A you-are-there portrait of the horrors of war and the incredible effect one selfless person can have on hundreds.
After discovering that his late father was a war hero, a son takes a deep dive into World War II and the terrors of the Nazi regime.
Along with Century (co-author: Hunting El Chapo, 2018, etc.), Tennessee-based pastor and first-time author Edmonds relates a fascinating war story. When the author’s daughter announced that she wanted to write a school paper on her paternal grandfather, Roddie, it startled him into realizing how little he actually knew about him. He knew from reading his father’s journals that the Nazis had captured him during battle and forced him to spend several months in brutal POW camps. Other than that, Edmonds knew very little. “His descriptions were terse,” writes the author. “Bare facts. Sometimes just fragmented sentences. Mental notes. Personal shorthand. Words clearly scribbled in haste.” Roddie had never spoken of his experiences, and Edmonds had never asked. Now, though, startled by his daughter’s plan, finding out all he could about his father became an obsession. He tracked down everyone he could find whose names were in the journals, and what they told him startled him even more: On more than one occasion, his father had saved the lives of hundreds of fellow POWs by refusing to follow Nazi officers’ orders, despite their threats to kill him if he did not. Ostensibly, the narrative—essentially a love letter from a son to his late father that is occasionally cloying—is about those two episodes, although Edmonds only devotes roughly 10 pages to them. In the bulk of the book, the author describes in chilling, horrifying detail how Nazi soldiers overran an American front line, captured thousands of GIs, forced them to march on frozen and frostbitten feet for days without food or water, and then tortured and starved them in POW camps, often leading to death.
A you-are-there portrait of the horrors of war and the incredible effect one selfless person can have on hundreds.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-290501-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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