A mostly valuable testimonial of the Pacific campaign’s desperate brutality—will appeal to fans of The Pacific or Band of...
Pulpy yet engrossing account of the vicious combat encountered by U.S. Marines in the Pacific theater of World War II.
Though co-authored by Allen, the main voice is that of Mace, who is unapologetic about his politically incorrect perspective (he often refers to his Japanese foes as “Nips” or in equally unpleasant terms). The intensity of his combat experience has clearly stayed with him all his life; recalling friends he never saw again after certain battles, he notes, “I suppose dying is just another way of saying good-bye.” The author is disarmingly honest, as when the young soldier-protagonist visits a prostitute in order to lose his virginity before shipping out, and particularly in his vivid recollections of an oddly idyllic Depression adolescence in Queens, with no clue of the storm that lay ahead: “Where in the hell is Pearl Harbor? Nobody had the foggiest that 108,504 U.S. servicemen would have to die…to answer that question, to make things right.” Mace describes the war in tactile, often gruesome terms, suggesting that the Pacific campaign was remarkably filthy and grueling, as when he encountered “Japanese corpses [that] have congested this open area with open wounds, glossy red tripe boiling from naked bellies.” The tough-guy prose recalls James Ellroy, but the first-person perspective suggests authenticity with regard to the little-understood experience of the frontline rifleman in the Pacific theater. Young Marines like Mace contended not only with a formidable and little-seen enemy, but also with military bureaucracy, inter-service rivalries, supply problems and an unbearable physical environment. The author mingles increasingly dark humor with terror at the seeming randomness of violent death in war, yet the narrative also dramatizes the diverse humanity of the ordinary Americans who were sucked into the conflict. The book culminates in a poignant scene in which Mace visits the mother of a close friend who died in battle.
A mostly valuable testimonial of the Pacific campaign’s desperate brutality—will appeal to fans of The Pacific or Band of Brothers.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00505-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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
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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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