A stirring combat memoir by a WWII paratrooper of the elite 101st Airborne Division, the famed Screaming Eagles. Burgett (Currahee!, not reviewed) writes here of his experiences during the heroic stand of small US forces at the strategic Belgian town of Bastogne, crossroads of seven converging, passable roads in the heavy forests of the Ardennes that the Germans needed to capture to ensure the steady stream of men, machines, and supplies necessary for a quick victory in the Battle of the Bulge. Burgett had already survived the carnage of D-day and Arnhem to become one of the “old men” (aged 19) in the successful defense of Bastogne, an epic of courage, fortitude, and spirit that stopped the huge, powerful, armored German army short of the vital port of Antwerp. Surrounded by overwhelming enemy man- and fire-power, the outnumbered light infantry paratroopers plus small elements of the 10th Armored Division and field artillery battalions held the line for weeks. US forces paid a heavy cost in lives and wounded until relieved by General Patton’s Third Army attacking the German flank. Burgett lost many of his buddies and original comrades in the bloody struggle—he himself was wounded three times—but the troops never lost the fighting spirit of their heroic leader, Brigadier General Anthony C. (“Nuts”) McAuliffe, who refused to surrender in a very dark time. Burgett’s spare prose captures the gritty reality of subzero temperatures; rough, snow-covered terrain; shortages of food, adequate clothes, heavy weapons, and ammunition. He gives the reader a sense of actually being there day to day with the squad and platoon, capturing the tension, excitement, and drama of their seemingly doomed situation, even though the reader may know the final outcome. Burgett bypasses the generals” war-game vantage point to give us a front-line soldier’s blood-and-guts eyewitness account of a decisive WWII battle.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-89141-680-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Presidio/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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