An excellent primary source for readers of military history, somewhat marred by Carroll’s editorial intrusions.
Poignant letters from American servicemen and their families in the midst of war.
Hindsight plays a major role in reading these letters. Many of the authors featured were dead by the time the addressees received their messages. Writing from the Civil War to the Gulf is included, with the different mentalities of each era shining through. In the War Between the States, writers committ more spelling errors and describe their campaigns extensively, including stories of meeting the enemy in person. In WWI, writers seem bewildered by the events they experience: Bombarded from afar while in trenches or sailing through waters infested with submarines, soldiers and sailors are more likely to describe their cramped living quarters and conditions in medical tents than actual combat. By Korea and Vietnam, servicemen’s letters become filled with appeals to families—either requesting guidance in conflicts they can’t understand or trying to convince Mom and Dad that the Communist menace must be stopped. Heroics are present, too, but in a mundane light. “Before we took the hill, we had a gigantic machine gun duel, and believe it or not, I went to sleep in No Man’s Land for 45 minutes,” writes an infantryman who participated in the invasion of Okinawa in WWII. After the letter, which includes much description of bloodshed, Carroll appends a note saying that military planners at the time expected far worse fighting in the invasion of Japan, which was put off with the development of the nuclear bomb. These notes sometimes provide essential context for the letters they follow, but they also occasionally feel like cheap shots. One becomes enthralled by a desperate, earnest, lonely fighting man’s letter to his wife or parents—then Carroll steps in and tells us that the man died in this or that historic battle. The weakness of the notes is testament to the strength of the letters.
An excellent primary source for readers of military history, somewhat marred by Carroll’s editorial intrusions.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0294-5
Page Count: 476
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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