A riveting eyewitness account of the notorious Bataan Death March and of three and a half years in enemy prisoner-of-war camps. Tenney was there on December 8, 1941, when a huge and well- equipped Japanese force invaded the Philippine island of Luzon. After a heroic defense, the American and Filipino soldiers surrendered. In the sadistic march that followed, Japanese soldiers broke all of the rules for humane treatment of prisoners of war. Tenney believes that the Japanese soldiers were seeking revenge for the defenders' stout resistance, the loss of about 20,000 Japanese, and the loss of face of their general. The author notes that the Japanese guards also meant to show their superiority over the Americans before Filipino onlookers by hitting, shoving, and spitting on the starved, sickly prisoners who walked too slowly to the prison camp. In some cases, the Japanese shot, bayoneted, or beheaded Filipino civilians who tried to give food to the Americans. Tenney bitterly remembers the survivors reaching Camp O'Donnell suffering from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, dehydration, pneumonia, beriberi, or diphtheria. Men were killed in the presence of their comrades in heat of well over 100 degrees. In camp, the author relates, Japanese captors refused medical treatment to American prisoners, who were dying at the rate of 50 or more a day, and to Filipino prisoners, who were dying at the rate of 150 a day. Tenney escaped and joined a guerilla group before being recaptured and returned to Camp O'Donnell, where he was further tortured. Finally sent to Japan, Tenney was set free after the Nagasaki bombing. But he retains a permanent sense of sadness for those who never returned: Of a total of 72,000 who were in the Bataan Death March, only 7,500 survived, and of 12,000 who were Americans, only about 1,500 came home. A grim story of heroic survival.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-881125-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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