A realistic look at a difficult, dangerous profession.
A former Navy jet pilot looks back on her training and career with a mixture of affection and dismay.
Johnson's first book alternates between chapters on her training in the Naval Academy and in flight school and those on her deployment on the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush in the Middle East in 2014. Her story begins in 2005, when she entered the academy as a freshman, transforming from “a somewhat privileged Colorado debutante with doting parents” into “property of the United States Navy.” Perhaps surprisingly, she looks back on her years of strenuous training with more gratitude and enthusiasm than those of her deployments. Although she clearly relished the thrill of flying jets and even of killing “terrorists,” an experience she likens to “playing the most important video game of my life,” she found flying extremely hard on her body and resented the constant low-level—and intermittent higher-level—sexism of life on a ship with very few women. The most intriguing segments of the book deal with the nitty-gritty details of Navy life, from the complications of female urination during a jet flight to the mental and physical challenges of SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, escape) school to the supportive relationships among the few women aboard the carrier. (The author's female solidarity does not extend to the “chickenhawks” and “homecoming queens” married to other officers and allegedly jealous of the time Johnson spent with them.) Less fascinating are the passages that deal with Johnson's romantic relationship with the emotionally distant Marine she nicknames “the Minotaur” due to his “chiseled upper body and skinny legs.” It's not clear why the book moves around in time so frequently, since the jumps can cause confusion for readers and the segments don't shape themselves into a narrative arc.
A realistic look at a difficult, dangerous profession.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-13929-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
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
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