A heartfelt, touching look back on a full life.
A World War II vet and businessman reflects on a life spent with his beloved wife.
Baron’s wartime experience started on a sour note and went downhill from there. He was promised officer training and an assignment to the Signal Corps but found himself trained as an infantryman instead. After hard soldiering in North Africa, he took part in the invasion of Italy, including a harrowing experience at the Battle of Monte Cassino, which, along with the deaths of his comrade and a friend, caused him to question fate, as well as the intelligence of his commanders. Baron returned to the States suffering from a severe case of PTSD years before its medical acceptance. After the side effects of his condition brought his academic career to a halt, Baron married a beauty named Lorraine, and soon she was helping him cope with postwar life. With Lorraine’s support, Baron embarked on a career in business, which was full of many adventures and, more often than not, misadventures. Although he never achieved the financial success he sought, with Lorraine’s help, he gradually came to realize that being a good husband, father and man made him a success. In the end, Baron achieves some degree of closure regarding both his war experiences and his sense of gratitude toward his wife, and he ends his book with reflections on love and devotion, as well as a photo gallery featuring pictures of Lorraine and the author separately and together through the years. Baron isn’t a professional writer, and the prose and narrative can be a bit rough around the edges at times, but he chronicles his full life with candor, relating his missteps as well as his successes. His deep, abiding love for his wife comes through on nearly every page and lends the book an emotional resonance not found in many other, more polished memoirs. Especially interesting are the passages relating to his war experiences and his subsequent struggle with PTSD, a condition not generally associated with World War II vets, at least not in the popular consciousness.
A heartfelt, touching look back on a full life.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1770972308
Page Count: 216
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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