Books on dogs who served in war make up a minor genre. This account will appeal to dog lovers and history buffs who can...
An enthusiastic dual biography of a man and his wartime animal companion.
A Czech volunteer in the French Air Force, Robert Bozdech crashed in no man’s land at the beginning of WWII. Returning to friendly lines, he discovered a puppy in an abandoned house and kept it throughout his service, including four years of missions for the Royal Air Force. With access to Bozdech’s papers and unpublished memoirs, journalist Lewis (co-author: Sergeant Rex: The Unbreakable Bond Between a Marine and His Military Working Dog, 2011, etc.), who has reported from war and conflict zones for a variety of news outlets, delivers a detailed narrative. Named Antis, the dog was impressively loyal, intelligent and stoic. It accompanied Bozdech in the headlong retreat across France after the Nazi invasion and cooperated as his master smuggled him aboard a ship to Gibraltar and then another to Britain (pets were forbidden). Antis smuggled himself aboard his master’s bomber and flew several missions over Europe before being severely injured by flak. He was also buried in rubble for several days after a bombing attack, shot by an angry farmer for chasing sheep, and suffered nearly fatal cold injury due to the fact that he waited beside the runway for Bozdech’s return, often for days, refusing food and ignoring rain and snow. His presence was no secret to the British media, who made him a national celebrity, and he later received the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross. Bozdech himself was equally impressive, completing his missions in Bomber Command (only half survived) and then completing another turn in the Coastal Command.
Books on dogs who served in war make up a minor genre. This account will appeal to dog lovers and history buffs who can tolerate the florid novelization and fictionalized dialogue.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3914-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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