Profiles in courage from the youngest members of America’s military family.
When military mothers and fathers are deployed overseas, they’re not the only ones called to make sacrifices for their country. There are nearly 2 million American children in military families, and their lives are marked with frequent moves, fleeting friendships and extra household duties to make up for an absent adult. Often they wrestle with the fear—and sometimes the reality—of having a parent wounded or killed in combat. Operation Homefront’s Military Child of the Year Award recognizes youths who display leadership and resilience despite the hardships. This small but heart-tugging book tells the stories of the 2011 winners and finalists from the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard. These remarkable kids faced estrangement, disease and parents injured in battle yet still volunteered countless hours to charities and excelled in the classroom. There is the story of 17-year-old Taylor Dahl-Sims, whose stepfather was injured by multiple IED blasts while in Iraq. With shrapnel still embedded in his face and suffering from a traumatic brain injury, her stepfather faced a long road to recovery when he returned home. Taylor not only helped her mother care for her two siblings, she went on to become the backbone of her family’s nonprofit North Star Group, serve as commander of her Air Force Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps unit and make the honor roll. Other children featured in the book overcome physical challenges: 9-year-old Lily Moser suffers from a neurological disease that causes her to have seizures several times a day, yet at age 6 she completed nearly 400 hours of community service and continues to participate in several charity endeavors. Inspiring is an inadequate word to describe the 25 vignettes about ordinary kids fighting through loneliness and self-pity with a positive attitude and willingness to serve. Told in concise, unadorned but engaging prose, these profiles offer proof that age and circumstance are not barriers to accomplishing great things. A window into the difficult lives of military children and a testament to those who persevere in spite of it.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466256514
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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