Warriors are like the rest of us, Hastings observes—which makes the accomplishments of the great ones all the more unusual....
An old-fashioned book about battles past, before the technocrats came along to ruin the notion of courage under fire.
Indeed, writes British military journalist and historian Hastings, “this study will be of no interest to such modern warlords as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, because it addresses aspects of conflict they do not comprehend, creatures of flesh and blood rather than systems of steel and electronics.” What characterizes the flesh-and-blood creatures whom Hastings studies is a particular kind of gumption in the face of mortal danger. To some, such as the impossibly accomplished Napoleonic soldier Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcellin de Marbot, courage seems second nature; he was apt to jump into freezing lakes to rescue wounded enemies, incur multiple wounds and save his beloved emperor, all in a day’s work. To others, initiative under fire was as much an intellectual, learned process as a reflexive, physical one; Hastings offers an affecting portrait of Joshua Chamberlain, the Maine rhetorician who became one of the Union’s most outstanding officers during the Civil War. To still others, courage was a nearly unwilling and certainly unexpected response; none of his fellow officers could have guessed that John Chard, the hero of Rorke’s Drift, would have organized so brilliant and successful a defense. And to still others, bravery in grave danger seems almost a path to escape from an unhappy life under ordinary circumstances; its revisionism will perhaps displease diehard fans, but Hastings’s portrait of the woeful Audie Murphy, “widely perceived as a soldier fighting a war of his own,” is sensitive and revealing, and it explains much about the ways in which heroes allow logic and instinct to be overridden by something much more elemental—and dangerous.
Warriors are like the rest of us, Hastings observes—which makes the accomplishments of the great ones all the more unusual. Of interest to students of tactics and military history—and perhaps of psychology as well.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4441-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
