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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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