A companionable, nostalgic salute to an unsung WWII heroine.
Caulfield (Murder in Pigeon Cove, 2011, etc.) presents a biography of a U.S. Army nurse, whose English posting allowed her to witness the heroic and tragic results of some epic 20th-century battles.
The author runs through the life and career of her elderly New England friend, a typical World War II Army nurse. However, nobody’s story can be called typical on the fringes of this fierce global conflict. June Houghton Sullivan, after a chaotic, cross-country upbringing during the Depression, enrolled in a Massachusetts nursing school at 17 in 1940. In 1943, she enlisted in the Army Auxiliary Nursing Corps and shipped out aboard the Queen Mary, through U-boat– infested waters, to work in the 120th Station Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland. Her unit relocated to different countryside locales in a grievously embattled Britain, where Houghton and her fellow caregivers labored to heal wounded Allied troops and, after D-Day, German prisoners. One Luftwaffe pilot received, unbeknownst to him, a transfusion from a Jewish doctor—the only match to his rare blood type. Other detainees were Axis conscripts, innocents who wanted no part of the Third Reich. Richly illustrated by Sullivan’s photo collection (including a snapshot of young Crown Princess Elizabeth), this slim volume sometimes takes unnecessary detours, addressing such tangential topics as President John F. Kennedy’s childhood bout with scarlet fever. That said, the book is tastefully written and suitable for young-adult readers—swear words are coyly bleeped, and there’s no immersion in combat-wound gore. Older readers may appreciate the chivalry and values of a bygone era, as when June quits an early hospital job after one day because young male patients got “fresh” with her or when a maimed SS officer in custody is allowed the honor of retaining his treasured Iron Cross.
A companionable, nostalgic salute to an unsung WWII heroine.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481896054
Page Count: 198
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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