Carefully detailed and very well narrated: a fine tonic for those weary of sectarian division.
A moving, memorable episode in WWII naval history.
Kurzman (Soldier of Peace, 1998, etc.), a former newspaper reporter with an apparent penchant for tragedy-at-sea stories, revisits the sinking of the USS Dorchester, a luxury liner turned troopship. On February 3, 1943, while carrying soldiers and military construction workers to Greenland, the Dorchester came into the sights of a German submarine and was sunk. Most of the 900 men aboard died, but many of the survivors reported that they had been helped to safety by four army chaplains—one Jewish, one Catholic, two Protestant—who met on board and formed fast friendships. One soldier later recalled seeing the four arguing some point of theology in a football-like huddle. “It seemed a strange sight,” Kurzman writes. “They were all of different faiths or denominations, yet they were conferring together as intimately as brothers. It was as if they were all of the same religion.” Moreover, the chaplains forged so close a bond that, by Kurzman’s account, they were disappointed at the chance that they might be assigned to different bases in Greenland. A fine model of ecumenicalism under any circumstance, the four chaplains drowned together after having given up their life jackets to their shipmates. Kurzman chronicles the lives of the four chaplains—Rabbi Alexander Goode, Father John P. Washington, Rev. George L. Fox, and Rev. Clark V. Poling—and those of several survivors; he even draws on the testimony of crew members of the German submarine. He also discusses the changing fortunes of their story: the four were honored with medals and commemorative postage stamps in the 1940s, then quietly forgotten until Senator Robert Dole revived their memory 55 years after their deaths and “helped push through the Senate a unanimous resolution, concurred in the House, to designate February 3 as Four Chaplains Day.”
Carefully detailed and very well narrated: a fine tonic for those weary of sectarian division.Pub Date: May 18, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50877-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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