A deep, compassionate group biography of these “unsung heroes” of the Merchant Marines.
An intricate look at the outsized role of a group of Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, families in the dangerous work of the Merchant Marines during World War II.
As former Richmond Times-Dispatch journalist Geroux delineates in this stringently researched study, the Merchant Marines “was not a branch of the military” but rather “an association of privately owned shipping companies operating under the American flag, employing American crews, and fighting like bull sharks over contracts to haul goods by sea.” Thus, they became vitally important in control of the seas when war broke out officially in 1941. Mathews County, Virginia, had a long reputation for producing the most capable mariners, and Geroux spotlights several families whose fathers and sons took the brunt in parrying the German U-boats that hunted in the waters of the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico, disrupting war supplies and oil to Britain and Europe. The author delves into the service of the Hodges family of Gales Neck, whose many sons became merchant mariners, working as independent contractors for the U.S. government who needed to carry the crucial war cargo across the seas. Facing the ramped-up U-boat campaign in the beginning stages, the U.S. did not have the wherewithal to protect the tankers and freighters—until the implementation of the convoy system in mid-summer 1942 after horrible losses at sea such as the sinking of the Onondaga. Geroux offers poignant accounts of these lost men, such as Onondaga’s Capt. George Dewey Hodges, whose remains and ring were soon after found in a captured shark. Sadly, however much the Merchant Marines aided in helping shepherd the convoys across the seas during the war effort, they were locked out of the postwar veterans’ benefits.
A deep, compassionate group biography of these “unsung heroes” of the Merchant Marines.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0525428152
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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