Son of Gen. Lewis ``Chesty'' Puller, the most decorated Marine ever, the author is a Vietnam vet who lost both legs and parts of both hands in the war. Here is his story, which seems to have as much to say about alcoholism as it does about the plight of the veteran. Puller does not acknowledge that he was an alcoholic prior to the war but, through the events he describes, the reader becomes aware of possible early-stage alcoholism. During the weeks prior to his departure for Officer Candidate School, for example, he embarked on a crash course of physical conditioning because of his ``four years of abuse'' to his body; on the day he graduated from OCS, he made sure that he ``had time to sign in...and still pick up a bottle...before the package store closed.'' And Puller recounts his drinking on his belated honeymoon and on the plane to Vietnam as a matter of course. His relationship with his father was one of admiration, he reports, though his early experience as a platoon leader convinced him that a military career was not for him. This and other steps in self-knowledge, however, appear to have been interrupted by his severe wounding. His description of his recovery is painful, heroic—and always clouded by alcohol. Even his sexual reunion in the hospital with his wife is accompanied by ``early afternoon tippling.'' In August 1969, as he began to ``look more closely at the Vietnam War and the leadership in Washington,'' he was angered by a mild statement made by another veteran in defense of protesters' right to free speech: in response, he ``[drank] too much that evening.'' Through long self-struggle, however, Puller has licked booze and now works as an attorney. Puller writes well; his story will appeal to veterans and their families, as well as those interested in the relationship between substance abuse and self-fulfillment.
Pub Date: June 17, 1991
ISBN: 0-8021-1218-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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
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
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