An honest account of matters once considered embarrassing—and much more common than civilians might realize, as a new...
One of the Greatest Generation writes affectingly of a long life spent wrestling with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Prisoners of war, Bussel notes, suffer disproportionately from heart attacks in old age, as well as various autoimmune illnesses—all maladies attributable in some measure to stress and anger. Shot down over Germany in 1944, Bussel, then 19, was shipped off to a POW camp on the shore of the Baltic Sea and was subjected to the usual indignities. His Nazi captors never discovered that he was Jewish, though, and he had something of a protector in a fatherly German guard who “made some everlasting changes in the way I look at the world.” The early pages of this memoir echo the work of Neil Simon, if with a slightly more exacting view of military medical inspections. Bussel writes with good humor about life in boot camp and specialist training, of minor insurrections and tensions among the enlisted and of his coming of age courtesy of a Florida ballerina turned stripper. (He ruefully reflects that he had forgotten to take along the lucky bra she had given him on the day his bomber was brought down.) Bussel told his family that he would return if the military sent them a notice that he was missing in action, and he lived up to his word. Yet he returned changed—and to a nation that was ever so slightly afraid of him. (He was turned down for a job for which he was perfectly suited because, the interviewer said, “my boss reads that you were a POW, he’s going to think I hired a loony.”) Bussel writes clearly and authentically about the various manifestations of what used to be called shell shock: anger, irritability, confusion, claustrophobia and years of attempts at self-medication before finding support and sobriety.
An honest account of matters once considered embarrassing—and much more common than civilians might realize, as a new generation of veterans is discovering.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60598-015-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
