An admirable work of historical resuscitation to show the life of a trench runner.
Chase reconstructs his grandfather’s time as a trench runner from the WWI veteran’s letters home in this nonfiction work.
On the front lines of World War I, there was no job as important—and as thankless—as that of the trench runner. Young soldiers were chosen for their athleticism and quick thinking to deliver messages on foot, a mission so dangerous that the life expectancy of a trench runner was normally mere days. “They understood their deaths would not be a matter of bad luck but the expected outcome of soldiers delivering messages through the muck and mazes of deeply dug trenches and the open spaces between the lines—a maelstrom of falling shells, thick crossfire, and anxious and accurate German snipers,” writes Chase. Though Chase knew that his grandfather, John DeWitt, had served on the Western Front, he never knew that the man—always reluctant to speak about the war—served as one of these trench runners. He discovered this fact only a century after the war’s end when the long-deceased DeWitt’s wartime letters were found in a shoe box in a relative’s garage. The author remembered his grandfather, who died right around the time Chase was starting college, as a kind, soft-spoken man, a small-town Iowa lawyer who liked football and golf and was self-deprecating about his wartime experiences when he spoke of them at all. Now a grandfather himself, Chase felt a new urge to use these letters to reconstruct John DeWitt’s wartime experiences, a task that required him to read between the lines of DeWitt’s sanitized accounts and compare them to the well-documented exploits of DeWitt’s unit, the celebrated Rainbow Division. The story takes him from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to the killing fields of the Marne and Saint Mihiel.
DeWitt’s letters are remarkable for their cheer and understatement, keeping the worst of the war from his family back home. “We all have slight flesh wounds,” he writes from a Paris hospital. “I got a wee bit of shrapnel in my left thigh. Elmer got a bit in the right buttock and Chris got a machine gun bullet in the flesh of the right leg. It was certainly a battle for fair. I suppose you know by this time we lost a lot of the boys but the greater part were only wounded.” In the rare moments when he allows himself to say more, the power remains in DeWitt’s restrained language: “I sure know what the hottest kind of fighting is in the worst way in history and, believe me, it is sure hell with a lot of extras thrown in.” Chase supplements his grandfather’s words with accounts from other soldiers, nurses, and newspapers of the time, painting a larger portrait of the trench runners’ experiences. The book will likely appeal most to WWI buffs, but the heart of the story is the manner in which the individual sacrifices of soldiers, in all wars, often go unknown or misunderstood by their families. A full century after the fact, one family at least can begin to appreciate those sacrifices.
An admirable work of historical resuscitation to show the life of a trench runner.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 259
Publisher: Hellgate Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.
Remembering “Hershy.”
Three hundred and twenty-eight days. That’s how long Hersh Goldberg-Polin was held in captivity—tortured and starved by his captors in underground tunnels—before he was executed. He was 23 years old. In this unvarnished and heartrending account, Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel, writes of the unending torment that she and her husband, Jon, endured after learning that their son had been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the attacks of October 7, 2023. Like so many other young people on that day, Hersh was attending a music festival in Israel—a celebration of love and unity. As Goldberg-Polin writes, her son was “the only American citizen kidnapped alive on October 7th who did not return alive.” In direct, plainspoken language that steers clear of politics, the author, a Jewish educator, recounts “being in a daze of the most indescribably sickening horror and fear, like nothing I had ever felt in my life. I remember my heart racing and feeling like I was in a permanent state of someone scaring me.” In addition to “shovel[ing] out my pain in the form of words,” she shares reminiscences of her son, as well as details that only a parent could notice. “His eyes were cookies,” she says of her “Hershy.” “I couldn’t find the pupils within the dark chocolate-brown irises.…He had a raspy voice, even when he was a baby.” And: “I thought he was hilarious; his sarcasm and humor were similar to mine.” Hersh and his sisters, Leebie and Orly, adapted well to life in Israel after the family moved from Richmond, Virginia. (Hersh was born in the Bay Area.) After being discharged from his service in the Israeli army as a combat medic, he was planning to journey around the world—a longtime dream of his. “So many people have come to love you, Hersh,” Jon Polin writes in the book’s afterword. And with one simple word that has the power to touch any heart, he signs off: “Dada.”
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798217198009
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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