Candid, personal, laced with thoroughly haunting imagery.
Memoirs from the Eastern Front by an ordinary Wehrmacht soldier with an extraordinary grasp the horrors of war.
In a cogent introduction, British historian Max Hastings stresses that the enormity and ferocity of the land campaign between Germany and Russia, the true centerpiece of World War II, were, and still are, in good part lost on Americans. The strategy of the U.S.—a small land force with air superiority—was premised on Russia paying the price in blood to defeat Hitler. At war’s end, Allied dead totaled perhaps one million citizens; the Soviets lost 27 million. U.S. and British forces killed a combined 220,000 German troops; the Russians killed three million and also shot 167,000 of their own troops attempting to flee the battlefield. Introspective Private Reese records his disdain for military service as well as his acceptance of its inevitability, and sets down in page after graphic page the absurdity of the war and his amazement at his own ability to sometimes revel in it (often drunk). After looting a captured train of spirits and food, he writes, “we…whooped and skipped over the rails and danced in the cars…made a Russian woman prisoner dance naked for us, greased her tits with boot polish and got her as drunk as we were.” In the aftermath of a night battle, however, he starkly recalls the faces of the dead and contemplates what is gained by fighting: “If I fell tomorrow, life would go on without me…thousands more were ready to work and to bring the task to completion, to quarrel with destiny, and prevail or, like me, fall by the wayside.” After a furlough, Reese returned to the Front and was killed in 1944; his diary was preserved for decades by his mother.
Candid, personal, laced with thoroughly haunting imagery.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-13978-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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