One of the better recent World War II memoirs.
The vast majority of World War II veterans have died in recent decades, but at 98, Lambert, who earned a Silver Star and multiple Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, is still around to tell his story. Readers will be grateful.
Born in rural Alabama in 1920, Lambert joined the Army in 1939 because it offered a steady income. Learning that he had once assisted a veterinarian, the recruiter assigned him to the medical corps. Nearly three years passed before he saw action, and Lambert and co-author DeFelice (West Like Lightning: The Brief, Legendary Ride of the Pony Express, 2018, etc.) deliver a lively account of his training and maneuvers in America and then in wartime Britain. By this time, Lambert was a noncommissioned officer in charge of a unit. He landed with the first wave on North Africa in November 1942 and then again with the first wave attacking Sicily in July 1943. Medical units worked at the front, enduring as many casualties as infantry, and the narrative features plenty of action and suffering, including several of Lambert’s own nasty, if minor, injuries. After Sicily, everyone returned to Britain to train for the invasion of France. For the third time, his unit landed with the first wave, this time on Omaha Beach, an experience far worse than the others. Within hours, Lambert received life-threatening injuries—ironically, from the ramp of an American landing craft that crushed him as he was helping a soldier in the water. Thanks to outstanding American medical care, he survived and, despite not finishing high school, went on to a prosperous career and extremely long life. Veteran ghost writer DeFelice admits to a great deal of research filling in details of the training and fighting, and Lambert’s narrative flows smoothly throughout, clearly showing the author’s heroism.
One of the better recent World War II memoirs.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-293748-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
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