Well-researched and engaging.
The life of the eminent naval hero that focuses on the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death as well as his military accomplishments.
As depicted by naval historian de Kay (The Rebel Raiders, 2002, etc.), Stephen Decatur (1779–1820) seemed destined for greatness at an early age. His father spent the Revolutionary War hunting down English merchant vessels, and Stephen earned his own glory in a navy very different from the service today. In the early-19th century, much of an officer’s income came from his share of property seized from the enemy, who in those days tended to speak French. Decatur distinguished himself by battling Arabs who spoke Italian, and he gave the young republican navy a resounding motto when an Algerian admiral asked him “Dove andate?” (“Where are you going?”), to which he replied, “Dove mi piace!” (“Where I please!”). Decatur’s initial course took him in the path of an older officer named James Barron, who at first was an important ally and friend; “in later years,” de Kay writes, “Decatur would freely admit that he had once revered Barron as his own father.” But the younger man’s reverential attitude disappeared when, in 1807, Barron struck his colors before an attacking English vessel without firing a shot. The attack, one of many incidents that helped precipitate war with England five years later, cost Commodore Barron his command, and Decatur served on the court that sentenced his onetime friend to a five-year suspension from the service. Protesting his innocence, Barron waited out his suspension as a merchant skipper in Denmark, then returned and requested reinstatement. Decatur, now a member of the Board of Naval Commissioners, outspokenly opposed this, and in response Barron challenged him to a duel—an act engineered by a third party, de Kay suggests—that cost Decatur his life.
Well-researched and engaging.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4245-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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