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
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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