Such tales of lives cruelly foreshortened and of survivors’ destinies abruptly rearranged are common to all wars, but the...
A son sensitively reconstructs his mother’s brief first marriage to a soldier killed during World War II.
In 1942, while working as a welder at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and helping to build the USS Missouri—aboard which the Japanese would later surrender to General MacArthur—21-year-old Sylvia Honigman met 26-year-old shipfitter Sam Kramer, temporarily draft-deferred because of his defense-industry work. Both were Jewish, bookish, classical-music enthusiasts and intensely committed to the war effort. Using letters, recordings and interviews, former magazine editor Everitt (A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist in Radio and Television, 2007, etc.) follows their growing love affair, which, after Sam’s draft notice, continued long distance from a number of stateside postings before their marriage. Sam was protected from combat because of his acceptance into the Army Specialized Training Program, designed to prepare soldiers with some college background to help govern occupied areas after the war. But battlefield reversals required him to set sail for Europe just 12 days after his first wedding anniversary. On April 15, 1945, he was ambushed on his regiment’s penultimate day of combat, less than three weeks before the Nazi surrender. Although Everitt later supplies startling information underscoring the utter fortuitousness of Sam’s death, he devotes the remainder of his story to the casualty’s ripple effect on Sam’s colleagues and on the strange Honigman and Kramer families (particularly on Sam’s vindictive mother Nettie), but mostly on the desolated Sylvia, who sought recovery working for the Red Cross at Avon Old Farms, a Connecticut facility dedicated to rehabilitating blinded soldiers. Helping run the place was the Protestant, unhappily married Edgar Everitt, the author’s father who, throughout the course of a 51-year marriage to Sylvia, carefully tended the memorabilia upon which most of this story is based.
Such tales of lives cruelly foreshortened and of survivors’ destinies abruptly rearranged are common to all wars, but the particulars supplied here render this one especially affecting.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56663-764-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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