Raw and dramatic stuff. Readers will likely experience a better-them-than-me feeling.
Before there were superheroes, there were these guys: the wild, wooly, and implausibly brave GIs of WWII, who here give us their version of the conflict in newcomer O’Donnell’s oral history of the war.
This is a tale told from many perspectives, made up of hundreds of recollections from men who served in the war’s elite forces: rangers, airborne troops, and the Special Service Forces. We are shown the war from the ground level, with all the chaos and snafus that were carefully edited from the newsreels here left intact. Little of it is heroic in the Hollywood sense, but it comes across as much more intense. One soldier describes how he was captured in Italy early in the war; he managed to escape and found sanctuary with the underground, only to be recaptured by German troops who summarily shot his rescuers as he was marched away. There is plenty of scary material (“When a bullet goes by you, the air current will suck by ‘whoosh, whoosh’ like that. You hear the crack. You know the ones that are on you.”), plus some chilling insights into the reality of combat technique (“Our orders were to leave no prisoners”). The recollections range from the understated (“At the time I didn’t realize it, but even with the A-10 parachute I had both kidneys dislodged from the jump”) to the macabre (“I sent my mother home some Nazi cups and egg saucers [from Hitler’s villa at Berchtesgaden] . . . very fine china”). And more than once, more than a dozen times, the words “I still don’t know how I survived that day” echo down the years. O’Donnell has grouped the comments by area of contest—Northern Africa, Normandy, Belgium, etc.—and precedes each of the men’s words with a short description of events surrounding the action.
Raw and dramatic stuff. Readers will likely experience a better-them-than-me feeling.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87384-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
Novelist See's (Golden Days, 1986, etc.) Dreaming is a searing memoir about drinking: about her family's relationship with alcohol—eventually, with drugs as well—and, more generally, about middle-class America's long love affair with intoxication. This clear-eyed anatomy of how addiction spreads across the generations is not for the faint-hearted. It probes painful regions of the soul that continue to obsess troubled Americans. It not only offers no cure, it offers no final argument against or for liquor. The first part of her memoir is the most compelling. See opens dramatically, painting an idyllic California backyard landscape in which a mother is beating a child. It is her mother, beating her. Exercising her considerable novelistic talents See vividly recreates her youth. She captures her mother's manifest alcoholic misery and her father's cheerful manner of masking his depression; the impact on all concerned of their divorce; and her stepparents' fascinating characters. See's own early marriages dissolve in liquor and dope-fueled scenes, as she and her father begin to move in an expertly outlined hippie milieu. See's sister Rose, meanwhile, long tortured by their mother, disappears into the wilderness of the drug culture. See devotes much space to transcribing Rose's experiences. These prove absorbing enough, but not quite in sync with See's own, despite what a late chapter title calls ``the embarrassing Californianness [sic] of it all.'' The bad times that See describes follow the patterns that obsess recovery movements (in fact, her father and stepmother were early AA adherents), but she refuses to let go of the good times, instead working heroically to cultivate a broad perspective that encompasses both. At a key moment, See claims that ``the second most boring thing in the world after people bending your ear about dreams is people bending your ear about their acid trips.'' But thankfully, with a resolute ``nevertheless!'' she tells of dreams, drinks, and trips all—proving herself exceptional for her brave storytelling, if not for her sobriety. Not the great American novel she and others in her family aspired to write—but a book that will nevertheless forever change how many of its readers imagine whatever the American dream might be.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43026-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author of a gritty portrait of an NYPD homicide detective (Close Pursuit, 1986) offers an equally vivid close-up of a US Army noncom before, during, and after the Gulf War. While Stroud focuses on Master Sergeant Dee Crane, a lifer whose MOS (military occupational specialty) is 11B (combat infantryman), he leaves himself plenty of room for maneuver. In recounting how his unmarried protagonist (blooded in Vietnam during the mid-1960s) preps young all-volunteer troops for deployment to Saudi Arabia, for example, Stroud moves backward and forward in time to provide historical perspectives on Crane's outfit, the 1st Division (a.k.a. The Big Red One), which has distinguished itself on battlefields from the Argonne Forest to the Kasserina Pass. He also touches on the horrific allure of combat, careerism in the Army's upper echelons, and the factors that prevent a long-serving professional like Crane from accepting, let alone pursuing, a commission. For the most part, however, Stroud's engrossing narrative is designed to illustrate how the brotherhood of sergeants—hard but not altogether hardened men plying a violent, demanding trade—constitutes the heart and soul of an armed force. Dragooned by his captain into a press conference on the eve of battle, Crane sets the record straight in grimly hilarious fashion on subjects as varied as casualties, the evolving role of women at or near the front, and the job of a soldier (``...to close with [the enemy] and kill him''). Though in the thick of the fighting, Crane and his inexperienced but well-trained men all make it home. At the close, nearing 50 and facing enforced retirement, the universal noncom takes cold comfort from the knowledge he has been ``a part of some great thing.'' A profane, like-it-is, and oddly elegiac take on close encounters of the enlisted man's kind that rings true throughout.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09552-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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