A grand tale told well.
In this notable debut penned by his granddaughter, a World War II veteran recalls action in the Pacific fleet.
Ten months after Pearl Harbor, young but gung-ho Robert J. Steinmetz convinced his parents to sign off on his Navy enlistment. “Steiny,” as Philadelphia working-class buddies called him, plunged from civilian shipbuilder to Shipfitter, Third Class, aboard the USS Gear ARS 34. The Navy issued these sailors only Marine knives for their assignment to plug holes in sinking ships. “Not even worth real weapons,” he concludes—“the lowest of the low.” He survived seven invasions and battles that forever changed him, hiding his anguish from family members for nearly 70 years. Fortunately, Steiny turns out to be a gifted storyteller. Jena Steinmetz, who began this as-told-to memoir as a project for her English degree, deftly captures her grandfather’s language and personality, as if readers are listening across the kitchen table. Despite a number of typos and editorial lapses that seem to have survived the production process, she demonstrates skill and judgment in transforming extemporaneous talk into fluid prose. Sentence fragments fill the book yet enhance conversational tone rather than hinder readability. Dialect, such as “nuttin’ doin’,” flavors the narrative without overshadowing it, and though some characters swear like sailors, it never feels heavy-handed. Steinmetz also uses novelistic techniques to control the presentation, opening with tense sailors below deck hearing gunfire, then backfilling Steiny’s childhood, enlistment and shipmate bonding. Steiny recalls events with remarkable clarity, and as Steinmetz writes with rich detail, summoning all the senses, the short chapters and poignant scenes propel readers, while time shifts help connect wartime and civilian life. A circle of blood on a white parachute evokes the Japanese flag, food tastes like gasoline, melting metal hisses, and rotting corpses, fresh paint and Iwo Jima’s sulfurous odor assault Steiny’s nose. Most painfully, screams of the fallen and handfuls of clinking dog tags haunt him: “It’s the sounds that still scare the man out of me,” he admits. Readers will quickly care about Steiny, making his postwar life relevant in vignettes that range from harrowing to heartwarming.
A grand tale told well.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480031074
Page Count: 312
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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