Colorful war stories told by a man whose patriotism and heroism are sufficient to command our respectful attention.
A World War II Marine chronicles his time in the service, culminating in the act that won him the Medal of Honor—and how that event changed his life.
Lucas, the youngest Marine to be awarded the medal, grew up in North Carolina; an unruly farm boy, he was sent to a military school when his mother remarried. The school brought out the best in him, believing as he did in honor and duty. When news of Pearl Harbor arrived, he wanted to enlist and fight the Japanese immediately. But at 14 years old, he was too young. In what became a pattern for his Marine career, he persuaded his stepfather to lie about his age and was soon in basic camp. Sent to a stateside assignment, he went AWOL to get to Hawaii, then stowed away on a troopship bound for Iwo Jima, where, on his second day of combat, he threw himself on two grenades to save the other members of his squad—and lived. His post-service career was in general considerably less exciting, other than a murder plot against him. Lucas comes across as a highly patriotic man who was a serious hell-raiser, especially in his youth. It is the story that carries readers through rather than the quality of the writing. Considering that he spent only two days in combat, the author’s escapades before he ever got to Iwo Jima, as well as his various stratagems to get himself into the combat zone, carry the bulk of the interest. There is very little on the battle that readers casually familiar with the war in the Pacific don’t already know, and one suspects that Drum had a good deal to do with getting the memoir into publishable shape. Still, if you were sitting in a bar with a veteran recounting these stories, you would almost certainly stay to hear them—and buy the teller a drink or two to keep them coming.
Colorful war stories told by a man whose patriotism and heroism are sufficient to command our respectful attention.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-279562-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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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