An eye-opening, first-rate account of a forgotten World War II episode.
A book chronicles a prisoner of war ordeal in a Nazi concentration camp.
Prolific author Martini (Exploring Tropical Isles and Seas, 1984, etc.) turns to World War II history for his latest offering, a thoroughly researched and fully documented work of nonfiction. Thanks to his storytelling skills, it reads like the smartest of historical thrillers—or else the screenplay for the Hollywood movie it could easily inspire. In a dual narrative, Martini unfolds the stories of two very different men at the close of the war and in their new careers. One of these figures is German scientist Wernher von Braun, who was involved in the operation of the Nazi V-1 and V-2 rocket program, whose wonder weapons were intended by Hitler to turn the tide of the war back in Germany’s favor. And the other focal point is the author’s own father, Frederic, a sergeant in the U.S. Air Corps who was shot down during a mission over France and taken prisoner along with several of his fellow airmen. They were eventually transferred to Buchenwald for two months, despite the official Army line that no American servicemen were held in Nazi concentration camps. The author juxtaposes the tales of the two men—one a U.S. veteran whose wartime experiences were denied by the very government he served, the other a Nazi weapons designer who used concentration camp slave labor at the Mittelwerk factory in Germany but was whisked out of the country and installed in style with his team as the mind behind the fledgling American space program. On one level, Martini tells a very simple story: a hero treated shabbily while a villain is rewarded. The reading experience of the book is far more than that, however, mainly due to the author’s unfailing dramatic instincts. He spent years delving into his father’s past, but unlike so many family researchers, he doesn’t rest on his findings—he also remembers to craft a narrative and fill it with telling historical and psychological portraits. Of his father’s ordeal in Buchenwald, Martini writes that he lost an average of one pound each day: “He emerged as a pared down version of his former self, leaving youth, optimism, faith, and all illusions about human nature behind in the dust and the greasy ashes.” Von Braun is depicted as arrogantly heartless: “What happened to incompetent häftlinge (prisoners) was none of his concern.” He is shown intent only on success (“His dramatic, charismatic, and flamboyant presentations had convinced Hitler…that a massive V-2 bombardment would change the course of the war, and now they would accept nothing less”). The multilayered injustices the volume reveals—not only the coddling of Nazi war criminals for their technical expertise, but also the silencing of veterans like Fred—should leave readers intrigued and unsettled in equal measure. Martini concludes his book with a stirring call for justice, exhorting the U.S. government to finally recognize his father’s wartime experiences.
An eye-opening, first-rate account of a forgotten World War II episode.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9991558-0-6
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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