A gripping history of “the Angels of Bataan,” nurses who provided selfless care under conditions of extreme hardship on one of WWII’s grimmest fronts. Before the Japanese attack on December 8, 1941, the US military base in Manila was regarded by those assigned there as a lush, exotic tropical paradise. Norman (Nursing/New York Univ.) captures a country-club atmosphere of pristine beaches, officer’s clubs, sports facilities, and dances, all facilitated by Filipino servants, that vanished in the space of five hours” assault. US forces retreated to Bataan, a wild, unsettled, untamed, disease-ridden jungle/mountain preserve, a land of monkeys, snakes, wild pigs, exotic birds, and huge rats. The 14,000 US and 73,000 Filipino troops, along with 99 nurses and about 200 doctors, faced health threats that included malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, roundworms, and skin fungi—not to mention 250,000 Japanese soldiers on the attack. US medical personnel set up jungle hospitals that were mercilessly bombed by the enemy despite Red Cross signs. Casualties from war and disease mounted. The army sought refuge in the offshore rock fortress of Corregidor, bombed and shelled daily until the starved garrison, short of food and supplies, with many sick and wounded, was forced to surrender. Norman spends much of the book describing the prisoners” sufferings in the overcrowded prison camps of Santo Tomas and Los Banos. As food rations were cut, people slowly starved. The nurses endured beriberi, pellagra, and scurvy while serving the sick and dying in the prison hospital. Relief finally came with the heroic rescue by US armored units and paratroopers in 1945. Final chapters briefly cover the postwar lives of surviving nurses, many of whom suffered later from ailments that could be traced to their ordeal in the Philippines. Norman’s touching and stirring narrative makes a fitting tribute to these remarkable women’s courage and dedication. (photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-50245-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.
Essayist, novelist and pop-culture guru Gay (An Untamed State, 2014, etc.) sounds off on the frustrating complexities of gender and race in pop culture and society as a whole.
In this diverse collection of short essays, the author launches her critical salvos at seemingly countless waves of pop-cultural cannon fodder. Although the title can be somewhat misleading—she’s more of an inconsistent or conflicted feminist—the author does her best to make up for any feminist flaws by addressing, for instance, the disturbing language bandied about carelessly in what she calls “rape culture” in society—and by Gay’s measure, this is a culture in which even the stately New York Times is complicit. However, she makes weak attempts at coming to terms with her ambivalence toward the sort of violent female empowerment depicted in such movies as The Hunger Games. Gay explores the reasons for her uneasiness with the term “women’s fiction” and delivers some not-very-convincing attempts to sort out what drives her to both respect and loathe a femalecentric TV show like Lena Dunham’s Girls. Although generally well-written, some of these gender-studies essays come off as preachy and dull as a public service announcement—especially the piece about her endless self-questioning of her love-hate relationship with the tacky female-submission fantasies in Fifty Shades of Grey. Yet when it comes to race-related matters (in the section "Race and Entertainment"), Gay’s writing is much more impassioned and persuasive. Whether critiquing problematic pandering tropes in Tyler Perry’s movies or the heavy-handed and often irresponsible way race is dealt with in movies like The Help, 12 Years a Slave or Django Unchained, Gay relentlessly picks apart mainstream depictions of the black experience on-screen and rightfully laments that “all too often critical acclaim for black films is built upon the altar of black suffering or subjugation.”
An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-228271-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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