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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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