While the 50th anniversary of D-day is being commemorated in many ways, few will be as affecting as the episodic journal of Marie Osmont, an aristocratic Frenchwoman who endured four comparatively pacific years of German occupation and three hellish months of liberation. Her chronicle, the centerpiece of a TV documentary to be broadcast by the Discovery Channel in June, offers a vividly detailed account of what it was like to be a noncombatant caught near Ground Zero when Allied forces made their long-awaited assault on Hitler's Festung Europa. At the time of the invasion, the widowed Osmont was mistress of ChÉteau PÇriers, a sizable Normandy estate about three miles inland from Sword Beach, where British Tommies landed in the early dawn of June 6, 1944. Although Boche soldiers were billeted in and around her home for nearly four years, she kept only sporadic records until the beginning of 1944. In the grim aftermath of Operation Overlord, however, her diary literally comes alive. A thoroughgoing patrician imbued with the spirit of noblesse oblige, the author reveals herself in print as a very human being. Appalled by the manifest horrors of war, she grieves for cyclamens crushed under the treads of advancing armor, fine old trees lost to fortification builders, and livestock slaughtered in the artillery duels that ravaged her demesne, as well as the civilian friends who were killed, wounded, or dispossessed in the fierce fighting. Osmont also proves an acute observer of alien social mores and appreciates the cosmic irony of death and destruction being visited upon rural innocents in the midst of an achingly beautiful summer. Her annals stop abruptly in mid-August of 1944, and the text at hand offers no clue as to her immediate or eventual fate. Eloquent testimony for posterity, reminding us that military campaigns, however just, have awful costs.
Pub Date: June 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43438-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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