An unflinching portrait of the times.
Novelist Litwak (Waiting for the News, not reviewed) pens an unsentimental WWII memoir that serves as a reality-check against the Spielbergian hyperbole and “Greatest Generation” nostalgia currently clouding our vision of that conflict.
When he was called up in 1943, 17-year-old University of Michigan freshman Litwak was disappointed by his medical corps assignment. “Medics carried no weapons,” he writes. “They were obliged to treat enemy wounded as well as their own. . . . I had imagined myself an armed, vengeful warrior.” By the end of this terse, vivid, occasionally funny, quietly ironic, often brutal narrative, young Leo has matured under considerable duress beyond this naïve view of war and his place in it. From his encounters with anti-Semitic officers during basic training in South Carolina through his first experiences with dead and dying buddies to his final weeks as part of the American force occupying the defeated Saxon town of Grossdorf, Litwak learns one lesson after another about death, cruelty, vengeance, survival, and moral ambiguity. His teachers include fellow soldiers like Maurice Sully (who sings about oral sex and loots the houses of fleeing German civilians) and Roy Jones (a farm boy who takes pleasure in assassinating German POWs), as well as small-time hustlers, enslaved Slavic workers, drunken Russian soldiers, starving German women trading sex for provisions, and other characters indelibly drawn in stripped-down prose. Love and altruism only occasionally brighten this dark picture. After V-E Day, Leo stops briefly in Paris on a futile mission to rekindle a “romance” with a prostitute he’d met there, then eventually goes home. “I wanted to strip away any evidence of war,” he realizes. “I didn’t ever again want to hear rockets or be summoned to give aid. I didn’t ever again want to dig in or see anyone wounded or suffer anyone’s dying. . . . Let that all be in the past, cleansed by recollection.”
An unflinching portrait of the times.Pub Date: May 8, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-305-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
A lively authorized biography of Mbongeni Ngema, creator of Sarafina! and other successful musical tales of black South African protest. Jones, former director of special projects at Lincoln Center in New York City, helped bring Ngema's play Asinamali! to New York. Her rapport with him while working on this book was such that he invited her to cowrite his new play, Magic at 4 am, scheduled for American production this year. Thus, while Jones does mention criticism of the irrepressible Ngema—rumors of a casting couch, patriarchal treatment of young actors—she aims more to place his drive and creativity in a larger context. Born in 1955, in the mostly Zulu province of Natal, Ngema came into theater through a musician buddy who employed him in a township musical he was writing. Jones describes Ngema's shifting network of friends, acquaintances, lovers, and black patrons who supported his fledgling theater work. She also threads in Ngema's growing political consciousness and his eventual connection to Johannesburg's legendary anti-apartheid Market Theatre. There, white director Barney Simon encouraged Ngema to create Woza Albert!, a musical that imagined what might happen should Jesus return to apartheid South Africa, and Asinamali!, praised by director Peter Brook for conveying the horror of black life while maintaining joie de vivre. Sarafina!, like its predecessors, was a kaleidoscopic series of tableaux; this tale of students in the 1976 Soweto uprising became an international hit. Jones steps back to describe Ngema's private life—his polygamous second marriage drew sensationalistic news coverage—and his bustling estate in a formerly whites-only suburb that reproduces a ``miniature, isolated Zulu community.'' Some references in the play excerpts deserve more explication, and the book is a bit dated; Jones could have done more to describe the debate over the future of theater in democratic South Africa. Still, a good introduction for American fans. (8 pages of b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-83619-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
Inspiring for family-history buffs but too staid for most general readers.
A sentimental history of family lore and furniture.
Following their mother’s death, former Philadelphia Inquirer Home & Design editor Tracy (Journalism/Washington and Lee Univ.) and her sister assumed the task of sifting through a household’s worth of antique furniture and collectibles. Faced with the dilemma of letting go of these long-treasured possessions, the author writes that “[w]e can, in fact, never be free of our stuff until we have dealt with the stories it carries.” Discussing her military family’s Canton china, the author begins with the story of her great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran who reared his family in varying remote Army outposts on the frontier. In 1900, his daughter Bess, Tracy’s grandmother, married a lieutenant and moved to Asia, where she was pregnant seven times. Sadly, due to tragedies like amoebic dysentery, only one of their children—the author’s mother—survived to adulthood. Interspersed with photos of family members and collectibles large and small—a sandalwood chest from China, a Spanish mission chest acquired in Manila, a so-called “George Washington chair,” where the first president may or may not have sat—the book is fueled by Tracy’s interest in unpacking old family lore by connecting the dots of her newly inherited possessions. These historical facts are relevant also because of the auction at which most of the items were sold. The author catalogues each piece, revealing multidimensional tales of how they came into her family’s possession and what each one represents (the dueling pistols, for instance, were once owned by Aaron Burr), and her newfound knowledge has the unsurprising effect of increasing her seller’s remorse. After the auction, Tracy furthered her thirst for information about her lineage by traveling to the Philippines.
Inspiring for family-history buffs but too staid for most general readers.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-553-80726-4
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
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