by Jane Sweetland ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2017
A deft, engaging history of two young soldiers’ brief lives.
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Sweetland (co-author: The Other College Guide, 2015) builds upon a cherished fragment of family history to create a comprehensive story of two opposing World War II pilots.
This well-researched volume tells of the author’s American uncle, Ted Sweetland, and the German who killed him, Joachim Müncheberg. On March 23, 1943, Müncheberg shot down Sweetland’s Spitfire over North Africa, but the American pilot steered his dying craft into the German ace’s Messerschmitt, killing him, as well. It was the 135th plane that Müncheberg had taken down and Sweetland’s first, as the German was a veteran pilot and the American a relative novice. Still, the author notes that the two were otherwise quite similar; both came from well-off families, and both were initially apolitical. The two even looked similar in appearance, she says: “[Joachim] was born just six months before Ted and when I saw his picture I thought they looked a little like cousins with their smooth white faces, light hair and deep blue eyes.” She details the histories of the two pilots as they make their ways to their joint, final fate. While Joachim, who came from a military family, was rising through the ranks as a pilot, Ted was trying to find himself as a California college student and fledgling writer and photographer. Joachim was shipped around the globe, wherever the Fatherland needed him; several months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Ted enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps against his parents’ wishes. Author Sweetland’s history is certainly quite a feat of research. She set out to learn more about the uncle she never met, starting with Ted’s war diary, then, through determined digging, located a nephew of Joachim’s, and this provided the foundation of this revealing work. Photos culled from family albums also help to bring the two men to life. In addition to family stories, however, Sweetland provides much-needed historical perspective by effectively explaining how World War II evolved and what exactly the two pilots’ places were within it. Overall, she’s done military-history readers a service by offering a war story on a very personal level.
A deft, engaging history of two young soldiers’ brief lives.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5426-1765-9
Page Count: 206
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Bonnie Tsui ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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