Though anecdotal and with a small sample set, Messner’s narrative points the way for other activists seeking to build...
Portraits of warriors seeking peace.
Military veterans are putatively honored in this military-minded country. However, writes Messner (Sociology and Gender Studies/Univ. of Southern California; King of the Wild Suburb: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons and Guns, 2011, etc.), “the voices of actual veterans who have fought our wars are mostly under the radar.” That is especially true, he adds, of veterans who have returned from war and now advocate peace—and resistance to war. Here, the author focuses closely on veterans of America’s most recent wars—in order, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War—to consider how their experiences intertwine with their activism and with their own self-identities. In the case of the WWII veteran–turned–peace activist, for instance, the “wartime thread…constitutes less than 2 percent of the tapestry of his life.” Yet, for all its brevity, his wartime experiences have proved formative, at least in part because he manifested symptoms of PTSD half a century after the war ended. Messner also examines the differing cultures to which veterans returned. In the case of Vietnam, the war was unpopular, but the anti-war movement “vibrant,” so that it included “thousands of antiwar veterans.” The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, conversely, are ongoing and have yet to form a defining counterculture. Still, as one veteran/activist who saw naval duty in Operation Iraqi Freedom observes, wars make veterans who share common experiences: He was “adopted” by Vietnam veterans, who in turn encouraged activism in such areas as opposing the Trump administration’s anti-Muslim mandates, building a modern movement called Veterans for Peace, “calling for peace at home and abroad,” as the veteran says. “Not just calling for it, but working for it…and putting our bodies on the line for it.”
Though anecdotal and with a small sample set, Messner’s narrative points the way for other activists seeking to build popular opposition movements.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-978802-81-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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