Intensely immersive reading.
A journalist tells the absorbing story of how wartime experiences shaped the lives and friendships of three female soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Michelle Fischer, Debbie Helton and Desma Brooks were three Indiana women who had very different reasons for joining the National Guard. The teenage Fischer wanted money for college. Helton, a 30-something single mother, wanted “a means of submerging herself in a group she held in high esteem.” Brooks, a 20-something with no clear life goals, joined “on a dare.” Each expected to fulfill their service obligations in Indiana, but in the wake of 9/11, all three would get far more than they bargained for. Thorpe (Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America, 2009) follows Fischer, Helton and Brooks over 12 years and two life-changing overseas deployments. She explores how the women met and bonded despite differences in age, political affiliations and background. Fiercely competent and dedicated, they were treated as outsiders to a male establishment that too-often regarded them with a combination of amusement, suspicion, hostility and desire. Yet the women showed that they were no different from the males with whom they served: They drank too much, had affairs and felt equally diminished when fellow soldiers died in combat. The obstacles they faced at home—divorces, resentful children, reintegration into society as parents, daughters, wives and lovers—were no less formidable. When Brooks returned to Indiana with PTSD, Thorpe reveals the devastating impact that condition—which is not as much discussed among female soldiers—had on not only her career, but also her life as a struggling single mother of three. The women would disagree about the value of the time they spent swept up in unexpected wars, yet as Thorpe demonstrates, none would ever question the meaning of the unstinting love and support they gave to each other and gratefully returned.
Intensely immersive reading.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6810-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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