Rousing story of idealistic Americans who fought against the Nazis with Britain’s Royal Air Force long before the U.S. entered World War II.
British-born historian Kershaw (The Bedford Boys, 2003, etc.) tells the story of young Americans who, after making their way to Canada and then by ship to Europe, where, in the summer of 1940, among 571 foreigners flying RAF Spitfires against the German Luftwaffe in brutal dogfights over the English Channel. Recruited by Colonel Charles Sweeny, a colorful mercenary and Hemingway pal twice expelled from West Point, these few Americans who fought in the Battle of Britain consisted of Olympic gold-medalist Billy Fiske, 27; Brooklyn skydiver Shorty Keough, 26; former MGM-employed pilot Eugene Tobin, 23; and five others, all civilian pilots intent on flying the powerful Spitfires (their Rolls-Royce engines could exceed 400 miles an hour) and determined to avoid the anticipated American draft. Risking loss of their citizenship in the still-neutral U.S., the fighter pilots were deemed “grand fellows” by grateful Brits, and in a decisive air battle on Sept. 15, 1940, they helped halt Hitler’s plans to invade Britain. The author draws on diaries, letters and interviews to recreate harrowing midair sorties against the background of Germany’s blitzkrieg advance across Europe and Churchill’s relentless efforts to coax the U.S. into the war. After the Battle of Britain, more than 200 Americans continued to serve in the RAF’s three “American Eagle” squadrons, which later became part of the U.S. Army Air Force. They were never prosecuted by the State Department; a dozen are still living.
A delight for military buffs.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-306-81303-3
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | MILITARY | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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