Dramatic and impressive, calling into question the voyeuristic war reporting of media conglomerates.
Well-executed, troubling account of a foreign correspondent’s addiction to combat zones.
Canadian-born Stewart, currently a fellow at Stanford, begins with a chilling portrait of his January 1999 encounter with a rebel in Freetown, Sierra Leone, who machine-gunned a government convoy, killing Stewart’s Associated Press colleague Myles Tierney and leaving Stewart with a bullet lodged in his brain. He then backtracks, describing his formative years as a journalist. After a dull start at the Toronto Star, he traveled to Asia for a more exciting beat with the Hong Kong Standard and UPI. He portrays an environment suited to hungry young reporters; by 27, he was UPI’s New Delhi bureau chief. His initial experiences in war zones—Indian snipers fired on him in Kashmir; in Afghanistan, he was briefly detained as a possible spy—caused him to crave more action, which he found as AP’s West African bureau chief. Based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, he was shocked by the region’s absurd bureaucracies and desperate poverty: “On almost every street, I was swarmed by clusters of scurrying little urchins.” To Stewart’s credit, his experiences covering Africa’s forgotten yet brutal conflicts cause him to question the atavistic career-mindedness that seemingly motivates war journalists. He recalls horrific scenes of torture, rape, summary execution, warfare conducted by children, and terrorist maimings, yet he indicates that Western approaches to such stories have accomplished little regarding the depredations of strongmen like Nigeria’s Sani Abacha and groups like Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front, renowned for their cruelty. Following Stewart’s injury, his AP colleagues arranged his evacuation via Swiss air ambulance to London, where a top neurosurgeon gave him a 20% chance of survival. The final third of his memoir depicts his difficult return to health, portraying both the support offered by his family and friends and his personal disorientation and anguish regarding the death of his friend Myles.
Dramatic and impressive, calling into question the voyeuristic war reporting of media conglomerates.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-380-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
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