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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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