From interviews and archival documents, Lascher creates a seamless narrative of daring and dedication.
Two journalists caught in war and love.
In 1936, when Stanford undergraduate Melville Jacoby first visited China on a student exchange program, he immediately felt drawn to the region and to travel. “The itch is perpetual,” he confessed. Jacoby returned to Stanford to focus his studies on Asian affairs and journalism, and by 1939, he had gathered enough writing assignments for a return to Asia. Briefly back in the United States, he met and fell in love with Annalee Whitmore, a writer who shared his fascination with the Far East. In 1941, she followed him there, and the two married. When journalist Lascher discovered that Mel Jacoby was his cousin, he was inspired to find out as much as he could about the man political journalist Theodore White called “one of the greatest U.S. war correspondents.” The result is a gripping, impressively researched debut, both a biography of Jacoby and a history of Asia in the throes of war. Mel and Annalee soon settled in Manila, where Mel became Time magazine’s Far East bureau chief; his reporting gave America its only “window onto the buildup for war in the Pacific.” Lascher ably conveys the frustration of Army officers with the “Europe First” strategy, which left them without necessary supplies and soldiers. He chronicles Japan’s increasing belligerence, the Nanking massacre, unceasing bombing, and internment of reporters. Fearing for their lives, Mel and Annalee left Manila, burning piles of notes before they fled to Corregidor. From there, they closely followed the war, including the “subdivision of hell” on the Bataan Peninsula. Soon, though, they needed to escape once more, this time making a slow, dangerous journey to Australia, traveling by boat only at night. From Melbourne, they learned of the Bataan Death March, which killed between 7,000 and 10,000 Americans and Filipinos.
From interviews and archival documents, Lascher creates a seamless narrative of daring and dedication.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-237520-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.
Frey’s lacerating, intimate debut chronicles his recovery from multiple addictions with adrenal rage and sprawling prose.
After ten years of alcoholism and three years of crack addiction, the 23-year-old author awakens from a blackout aboard a Chicago-bound airplane, “covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.” While intoxicated, he learns, he had fallen from a fire escape and damaged his teeth and face. His family persuades him to enter a Minnesota clinic, described as “the oldest Residential Drug and Alcohol Facility in the World.” Frey’s enormous alcohol habit, combined with his use of “Cocaine . . . Pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP and glue,” make this a very rough ride, with the DTs quickly setting in: “The bugs crawl onto my skin and they start biting me and I try to kill them.” Frey captures with often discomforting acuity the daily grind and painful reacquaintance with human sensation that occur in long-term detox; for example, he must undergo reconstructive dental surgery without anesthetic, an ordeal rendered in excruciating detail. Very gradually, he confronts the “demons” that compelled him towards epic chemical abuse, although it takes him longer to recognize his own culpability in self-destructive acts. He effectively portrays the volatile yet loyal relationships of people in recovery as he forms bonds with a damaged young woman, an addicted mobster, and an alcoholic judge. Although he rejects the familiar 12-step program of AA, he finds strength in the principles of Taoism and (somewhat to his surprise) in the unflinching support of family, friends, and therapists, who help him avoid a relapse. Our acerbic narrator conveys urgency and youthful spirit with an angry, clinical tone and some initially off-putting prose tics—irregular paragraph breaks, unpunctuated dialogue, scattered capitalization, few commas—that ultimately create striking accruals of verisimilitude and plausible human portraits.
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.Pub Date: April 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50775-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
4 Book Adaptations to Check Out In December
Dillard's headlong immersion into the mysteries of the natural world—from bedrocks to the heavens, and flora and fauna (from amoebas to us)—places this childhood memoir of life with a companionable family in Pittsburgh's elite enclave in the 50's and 60's. There is less tugging at the rare insight, the wild surmise, as in, say, Dillard's Teaching the Stone to Talk (1982), and this bright, imaginative whack through the "overgrown path" back to the past is more accessible to the general reader. Awareness is all to Dillard. To the tot, "mindless and eternal," playing on the kitchen floor, will come, in the roaring flood of time, "the breakthrough shift between seeing, and knowing you see." Aware as the dickens, Dillard found that everything in the world is "an outcrop of some vast vein of knowledge." The child Dillard will read books "to delirium," investigate rocks and insects, "pry open a landscape" with a microscope, draw faces, and just because it felt marvelous, pretend to fly, arms flapping, clown a Pittsburgh main street. In between accounts of such fabulous flights and efforts of concentration which "draw you down so very deep," there are delightful portraits of a set of attractive parents (shameless connoisseurs of jokes, both ancient and practical) and not unaffectionate views of Pittsburgh's Old Guard, at Country Club play to actually praying (to teen-ager Dillard's angry astonishment) in sables and tailcoats, in their gold-plated church). There are tales of mischief-making, dances and boys, school and the fine and splendid rages of adolescence ("I was a dog barking between my own ears"). Throughout, Dillard rumples up the placid life. An overview of one particular childhood told with shiver and bounce, and another Dillard voyage of discovery as she continues to "break up through the skin of awareness . . .as dolphins burst through the seas. . ."
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1987
ISBN: 0060915188
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
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