A rich life too often flattened into dry chronology.
The story of one teen’s work spying for the Belgian resistance and French underground during World War II, this is a new edition revised and updated by Holocaust educator Stephen Feinberg.
On May 10, 1940, the German army bombed Brussels, and 15-year-old Roman Catholic Rostad’s life changed forever. After exposure to the horrors of war as a Red Cross volunteer, Rostad, code name Squirrel, became a saboteur in a Nazi-run factory where members of the resistance first contacted her. When fellow resisters went missing, she realized she must leave and join the Free Belgian Army in England. Heading toward Portugal, where she’d board a ship to England, she delivered intelligence, documents, and small arms. Just before crossing the border into Spain, however, news of a Spanish bounty on resisters forced her to remain in France, where she spent the rest of the war. The memoir covers the entirety of Rostad’s life, including her marriage to an American GI, immigration to the U.S., and commitment to educating people about the horrors of the Holocaust. Unfortunately, her account tends toward flat summary, and the authors display a preference for dwelling on happier times, providing more richly detailed anecdotes from Rostad’s Depression-era childhood than from her wartime efforts. Lengthy quotations and explanations of historical context slow the narrative. Nevertheless, given the dearth of teen literature spotlighting the resistance, this work represents a valuable resource for initiates seeking firsthand information.
A rich life too often flattened into dry chronology. (notes, discussion questions) (Nonfiction. 13-18)Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781682753774
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Fulcrum
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
A keen challenge to received opinions for high schoolers to chew long and hard upon.
Doeden makes the effort here to bring whistleblowing out of the seamy shadows and describe its role.
It may be a new word, but whistleblowing is no new phenomenon; the Continental Congress acknowledged the citizen’s duty “to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds and misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.” Of course, this brings up the age-old question of who is spying on the spies or, even more vital: to whom does a whistleblower give the information? Doeden makes it clear that whistleblowing is a selfless deed, one that may well have implications for the whistleblower down the road, including exile, as those in Washington wrangle over whether Homeland Security trumps the First Amendment when it comes to “misconduct, frauds and misdemeanors.” As Doeden shows, nearly one-third of the states do not have laws protecting whistleblowers’ “rights to report illegal activity [as] part of a philosophy of social obligation...when it could prevent or reduce harm of suffering.” To illustrate his case, he draws a number of sharp vignettes (accompanied by photographs) of whistleblowing importance: Enron, the Jerry Sandusky scandal, Watergate, FBI withholding of crucial 9/11 information; Edward Snowden’s story leads everything off.
A keen challenge to received opinions for high schoolers to chew long and hard upon. (Nonfiction. 13-18)Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4677-4209-2
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Twenty-First Century/Lerner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
An uncommon (to say the least) coming-of-age, retraced with well-deserved pride but not self-aggrandizement, and as...
Selecting high and low points from his experiences as a child, college student, teacher, refugee-camp worker, amateur boxer, Rhodes scholar, Navy SEAL and worker with disabled vets, Greitens both charts his philosophical evolution and challenges young readers to think about “a better way to walk in the world.”
Revising extracts from his memoir The Heart and the Fist (2011) and recasting them into a more chronological framework, the author tells a series of adventuresome tales. These are set in locales ranging from Duke University to Oxford, from a low-income boxing club to camps in Rwanda and Croatia, from a group home for street children in Bolivia to a barracks hit by a suicide bomber in Iraq. Prefacing each chapter with a provocative “Choose Your Own Adventure”–style scenario (“What do you do?”), he describes how similar situations ultimately led him to join the military, impelled by a belief that it’s better to help and protect others from danger than to provide aid after the fact. What sets his odyssey apart from Howard E. Wasdin and Stephen Templin’s I Am a SEAL Team Six Warrior (2012) and most other soldiers' stories is an unusual ability to spin yarns infused with not only humor and memorable lines (SEAL training’s notorious Hell Week was “the best time I never want to have again”), but cogent insights about character and making choices that don’t come across as heavy-handed advice.
An uncommon (to say the least) coming-of-age, retraced with well-deserved pride but not self-aggrandizement, and as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. (endnotes, bibliography [not seen]) (Memoir. 14-18)Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-86852-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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