A companionable, nostalgic salute to an unsung WWII heroine.
Caulfield (Murder in Pigeon Cove, 2011, etc.) presents a biography of a U.S. Army nurse, whose English posting allowed her to witness the heroic and tragic results of some epic 20th-century battles.
The author runs through the life and career of her elderly New England friend, a typical World War II Army nurse. However, nobody’s story can be called typical on the fringes of this fierce global conflict. June Houghton Sullivan, after a chaotic, cross-country upbringing during the Depression, enrolled in a Massachusetts nursing school at 17 in 1940. In 1943, she enlisted in the Army Auxiliary Nursing Corps and shipped out aboard the Queen Mary, through U-boat– infested waters, to work in the 120th Station Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland. Her unit relocated to different countryside locales in a grievously embattled Britain, where Houghton and her fellow caregivers labored to heal wounded Allied troops and, after D-Day, German prisoners. One Luftwaffe pilot received, unbeknownst to him, a transfusion from a Jewish doctor—the only match to his rare blood type. Other detainees were Axis conscripts, innocents who wanted no part of the Third Reich. Richly illustrated by Sullivan’s photo collection (including a snapshot of young Crown Princess Elizabeth), this slim volume sometimes takes unnecessary detours, addressing such tangential topics as President John F. Kennedy’s childhood bout with scarlet fever. That said, the book is tastefully written and suitable for young-adult readers—swear words are coyly bleeped, and there’s no immersion in combat-wound gore. Older readers may appreciate the chivalry and values of a bygone era, as when June quits an early hospital job after one day because young male patients got “fresh” with her or when a maimed SS officer in custody is allowed the honor of retaining his treasured Iron Cross.
A companionable, nostalgic salute to an unsung WWII heroine.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481896054
Page Count: 198
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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