A tale of impressive endurance, not enhanced by the surfeit of machismo.
Amped-up memoir of an elite warrior determined to fight on for his country, even after giving up a limb.
The Army Rangers are renowned as the original Special Operators, whose roots, according to Kapacziewski and co-author Sasser (Sanctuary, 2013, etc.), go back to pre–Revolutionary War frontiersmen. The author joined the military in order to become a Ranger; he describes handling the Ranger Indoctrination Program, similar to the Navy SEALs’ notorious “Hell Week,” with aplomb. “Rangers would be deployed to combat zones almost constantly” in the years after 9/11, he writes. “This was the best time in all history to be a Ranger.” Yet he bemusedly notes that “[n]othing went wrong” on his first tour of Afghanistan in 2002. Kapacziewski saw combat in repeated tours of Iraq, but he clearly enjoyed both the experience of war and the opportunity to marry an all-American girl at home, Kimberly (who provides narrative counterpoint). At first, under Special Ops’ protective canopy, the author felt charmed: “No one ever seemed to get hurt on our side.” He notes that modern accouterments like satellite phones, the Internet and Skype “made the war seem less dangerous.” But his luck ran out in Mosul in 2005, when a grenade came through a hatch of a Stryker vehicle, resulting in severe injuries to his arm and leg. His difficult rehabilitation makes up the narrative’s final third, with the twist that Kapacziewski’s mulish determination led to a unique triumph: “Almost a year and a half after amputation, I was back on the line as a squad leader…the first amputee to return to full combat duty.” Yet despite all his experiences, the author seems to have issues with the topics of masculinity and service: He makes clear to readers that any modern man who’s not an Army Ranger is probably a “sensitive, touchy-feely” effeminate pseudo-male.
A tale of impressive endurance, not enhanced by the surfeit of machismo.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1250010612
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
