A memorable portrait of men in battle.
An episodic account of a little-covered arena in the much-covered genre of WWII: close air combat in the war against Japan.
Bestselling Bradley (Flags of Our Fathers, 2001) renders due homage to the exploits of long-distance bomber crews in the Pacific campaign, and particularly the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in 1942, the net effect of which, along with 90-odd burned buildings, was that “Japanese belief in their invincibility had been rudely shaken.” At the same time, half a year after Pearl Harbor, Americans got a good morale boost out of the bombing, and young men rushed to become flyers—who were already, thanks to Charles Lindbergh and company, perceived as “the coolest of the cool.” Bradley’s account centers on the new crop of pilots, many of them teenagers when the war broke out, who piloted fighters and dive bombers against the Japanese in the last two years of the war. Most famous of the nine men he treats in detail is George H.W. Bush, who was shot down over the island of Chichi Jima in 1944, but not before delivering his payload of bombs. Bush survived, was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroism under fire, and went on, of course, to the White House. Bush’s eight fellow pilots were not so lucky: they were captured, and treated so brutally that the US Navy effectively whitewashed their story, offering only a censored version of events to their families while executing many of the Japanese captors for their war crimes. Bradley writes vigorously, if graphically, about torture, beheading, disemboweling, and other unpleasant realities of POW life on Chichi Jima, though he takes great care to air those events from the Japanese point of view, one that equated surrender with dishonor and that did not honor the Geneva Convention. Yet, American pilots acknowledged, they, too, behaved similarly in the name of duty. Said one survivor, wisely, “I believe any culture can be indoctrinated into any attitude that the leaders want to teach them.”
A memorable portrait of men in battle.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-10584-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
