An impressive and eloquent account of a soldier’s life and culture.
An American Army veteran’s memoir of his experiences in the European theatre of World War II.
This excellent memoir details the author’s life as a dogface in the Third Infantry Division of the U.S. Army. Starting his career on March 12, 1943, with the war already in full swing, the young Brown recounts his basic training exploits in an almost halcyon tone. This lack of pretension or existential dread will surprise many readers weaned on Vietnam-era satire and the first 40 minutes of Full Metal Jacket. Brown delivers his choice experiences matter-of-factly and makes no apologies for doing so. However, into these sunny memories Brown deftly weaves the telling wisps of death. When digging an ominously measured 6x6x6-foot hole in the ground as punishment during training, Brown discovers a small cache of ordinance. After Brown finds a stray grenade, his commanding officer orders him to dig more and see what else is there. It’s a perfect image with the young untested man already digging a grave-like hole and discovering the dangers of war can be found even in South Carolina. This subtle style advances forth as Brown’s company learns proper grenade throwing technique; a flub during training results in nothing more than a few nervous seconds, but without overt exposition, it’s understood that it might have been his first experience with a casualty of war. Brown moves the reader brusquely to Italy and here the war proper begins. The grind and anxiety of guard duty, and in perhaps the most intense and confessional moment, Brown reluctantly describes one of the few nagging dreams he still has that’s inspired by the war. It’s about as gory as he gets in the memoir and also as honest, which gives the narrative an incredible dimension. Throughout the memoir, Brown explains that the charge of his book comes from the many children of veterans looking for information about their very reticent fathers. So here is an honest and articulate summary of experience that can’t be so easily explored by the calcified clichés of popular culture. Brown admits his generation is in its twilight, and so these chronicles are more important and rewarding than ever.
An impressive and eloquent account of a soldier’s life and culture.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456853969
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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