A provocative examination of the Pararescue Jumpers, a little-known Air Force/Air National Guard unit that performs both military and civilian rescues, lavishly detailed here. Brehm, a —PJ— for 20 years, wisely allowed magazine writer Nelson to frame his life story in the context of recent PJ history in a distanced third-person mode. The genre’s signature workmanlike prose style clarifies the weathered humanity of Brehm and his fellow PJs, and their rueful altruism in their hazardous work. The authors lead us through the American military’s delayed development of viable parachute units up to the Vietnam era, when the PJs established a benchmark by rescuing a large number of downed flyers behind enemy lines (as not long ago in Kosovo). Brehm’s experience—he joined in the mid-1970s as a skinny kid with a huge Afro—is presented as typical of the harrowing training regimen, which —washes out— nearly 90 percent of PJ applicants and essentially combines the separate specialty schools of the Green Berets, SEALs, and other elite units. The authors also go into technical detail in depicting the PJs— arcane equipment and tactics. The welter of information is anchored by gripping depictions of rescue at sea, in major storms, and on Mount McKinley (including incidents in which PJs are lost in action)’seemingly tailor-made for The Perfect Storm’s demographic. Yet beneath such gung-ho antics lurk disquieting social questions and echoes of class inequity, as in the PJs— shamefully low salaries and their high loss rate. Similarly, Brehm and Nelson provide a rare portrait of Long Island as something other than a playground for the suburbanized rich, affectingly emphasizing the blue-collar and nautical communities, like Brehm’s large family and his L.I.—based unit, which have underwritten the region’s history. A macho page-turner with resonance and heart that rescues a cadre of rough everyday heroes from undeserved obscurity. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-609-60504-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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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