Abner writes of his long, hairy journey from an Oregon farm to the controls of a P51 Mustang in the Eighth Air Force during WW II. Unlike the men in bomber crews, fighter pilots flew alone and had to fill the roles of navigator, gunner, bombardier, and radio man. Abner describes his demanding training and testing, and the camaraderie between combat officers and enlisted men in aerial warfare. Master sergeants took charge of meticulous safety maintenance and the preparation of the plane for combat. Officers would come and go, replaced, transferred, promoted, or killed, while the experienced ground crews carried on and kept planes in top condition. Abner notes that, despite the risks of a crash or of sudden death in a flaming plane, no combat flyer would change places with his comrades on the ground—who often lived on K rations, took shelter in filthy foxholes, and slept on the cold, wet earth. Airmen, in contrast, returned to a secure base after a mission, had a change of clothes, a few drinks, a hot dinner, a card game, perhaps even watched a movie, and slept between sheets. Called to action in the Battle of the Bulge, the fighter pilots in Abner's group endured strafing and bad weather to repeatedly attack enemy troops—and they lost many comrades. Combat scenes and narrow escapes are vividly drawn here, and the climax is a description of a great air battle during which Abner's group set a WW II record of 56 confirmed enemy planes downed in one day. A fine, frank memoir of WW II air combat in the European theater.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1997
ISBN: 1-57249-025-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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