Dear Kara by Paul Giannone | Books in Review

Paul Giannone joined the U.S. Army and served two tours in Vietnam (1969-70) as a Public Health Advisor. Giannone’s service in the war is at the heart of his well-written memoir, Dear Kara: One Man’s Journey From War to War (Dream Catcher Publishing, 269 pp., $19.95, paper). The book is dedicated to Giannone’s daughter Kara, who was born in 1993.

Giannone today is the deputy director of Global Disease Detection and Emergency Response in the Center for Global Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. In his book, he also recounts his work after the war as an emergency responder and public health specialist in places such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, Albania, and Iran.

As our colleague Bernie Edelman notes on the book’s back cover: “Dear Kara is a sometimes searing, often poignant and always engaging collection of stories and incidents from Paul Giannone’s ongoing journey to such garden spots as war-ravaged Vietnam, barren Sudan, hopeless Albania and revolutionary Iran to make the world just a little better place, a world in which the real heroes go unsung and the enemy, often, is us.”

—Marc Leepson

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