Any reader who wonders about the significance of such a mission will have no reservations by the end of this...
The journalist’s reporting is impressive, but the storytelling is what distinguishes this account of identifying the remains of military casualties decades after they died in war.
As national security reporter for the Boston Globe, Bender has covered recent conflicts in the Middle East and Asia. Here, the author tells the parallel stories of two young military men, separated by half a century but intertwined with the narrative momentum of a compelling mystery and the depth of character of a rich novel. Ryan McCown was a World War II Marine pilot, an archetypal Southern gentleman from Charleston, S.C. When he and others failed to return from a mission, his fate was unknown; he was presumed dead, though there was talk that he was missing or had been taken prisoner. Flash forward to the late 20th century, and McCown’s story alternates with that of George Eyster V, the only son in a family with a long military legacy but felt unsuited to follow, who preferred to exert himself as a lacrosse star and go drinking with his buddies afterward: “There were too many things about the Army he found unappealing—the rootless existence, the need to constantly follow orders and bow to authority, and, yes, the prospect of real danger. It was an honorable calling, he knew, just not for him.” The author humanizes the stories of both men, putting them in the context of their families, their romances, the novels they read and the poetry they wrote. Ultimately, Eyster resolved his ambivalence about the military through a mandate that involved using advances in forensic science to identify the remains of soldiers from battles before he was born and to bring them home. Instead of being “prepared to inflict as much damage as possible on America’s enemies,” he could help with “putting things back together again.”
Any reader who wonders about the significance of such a mission will have no reservations by the end of this well-structured, well-written book.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0385535175
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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