Abner writes of his long, hairy journey from an Oregon farm to the controls of a P51 Mustang in the Eighth Air Force during WW II. Unlike the men in bomber crews, fighter pilots flew alone and had to fill the roles of navigator, gunner, bombardier, and radio man. Abner describes his demanding training and testing, and the camaraderie between combat officers and enlisted men in aerial warfare. Master sergeants took charge of meticulous safety maintenance and the preparation of the plane for combat. Officers would come and go, replaced, transferred, promoted, or killed, while the experienced ground crews carried on and kept planes in top condition. Abner notes that, despite the risks of a crash or of sudden death in a flaming plane, no combat flyer would change places with his comrades on the ground—who often lived on K rations, took shelter in filthy foxholes, and slept on the cold, wet earth. Airmen, in contrast, returned to a secure base after a mission, had a change of clothes, a few drinks, a hot dinner, a card game, perhaps even watched a movie, and slept between sheets. Called to action in the Battle of the Bulge, the fighter pilots in Abner's group endured strafing and bad weather to repeatedly attack enemy troops—and they lost many comrades. Combat scenes and narrow escapes are vividly drawn here, and the climax is a description of a great air battle during which Abner's group set a WW II record of 56 confirmed enemy planes downed in one day. A fine, frank memoir of WW II air combat in the European theater.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1997
ISBN: 1-57249-025-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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