Will reward readers interested in the Iraq war, or disaster management, or anyone interested in taking an intelligent...
Rudyard Kipling meets Dilbert in this engrossing memoir of a year’s service in Iraq by a British member of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
When 30-year-old Stewart took up his post in September 2003 as Acting Governorate Coordinator in Amara in southern Iraq, he had recently walked across Afghanistan (a trek he recounts in The Places in Between, May 2006) and done stints as an infantry officer and member of the British Foreign Service. None of this entirely prepared him for the task of nation-building in a country with a broken command-economy and a political culture consisting of competing conspiracies among tribal sheikhs, gangsters and different flavors of theocrat. The author is careful to point out the many occasions on which the expectations of the Coalition were confounded by events. Having first experimented with appointed councils, for instance, he found that only local elections gave politicians the legitimacy to act. He also learned that the Coalition’s unwillingness to use lethal force to defend property, particularly public property, was not regarded as humane restraint, but as a sign of weakness. He and his colleagues did manage to foster a sort of order in Asmara and later in neighboring Nasiriyah before the handoff of civil authority to the Iraqi interim government in June 2004, though he expresses mixed feelings about the nature of that order. Although his memoir contains some derring-do, notably at the climactic siege of Nasiriyah, this is not really a war story, but rather an account of bureaucracy punctuated by gunfire. The chapters are short, often devoted to a single meeting or conference, and each imparts lessons: how to cajole action when you are not in the chain of command, for instance, or how to make a successful budget request based on ignorance and optimism. Despite its exotic setting, the story is strangely familiar.
Will reward readers interested in the Iraq war, or disaster management, or anyone interested in taking an intelligent adventure.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101235-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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