A you-are-there enterprise in the Steven Ambrose vein, full of surprising turns and not a few ironies.
Talk about a bad trip: Four would-be conquerors wander across some of North America’s most difficult country for eight years, and they don’t even find gold to make up for their troubles.
The story of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s unwanted expedition into the interior is well-known to students of Spanish colonial history and has a huge scholarly literature surrounding it, but there are few popular works devoted to it as compared to, say, the easier journey of Lewis and Clark. Schneider’s well-told tale begins with avarice and jealousy, as the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez, having rebelled against the better-connected Hernán Cortés and been imprisoned for his troubles, nonetheless manages to convince the Spanish crown to let him take charge of conquering “the entire Gulf Coast of what would one day become the United States.” His fleet—not well-outfitted, for Narváez was broke—made the area of Tampa Bay in 1528, and his contingent of Caribs, Africans and Spanish soldiers marched off into the unknown for food and riches. Second-in-command by virtue of being King Charles V’s “eyes and ears on the ground during the expedition”—for, naturally, the king wanted his cut—Cabeza de Vaca found himself contesting Narváez’s increasingly impetuous decisions at every turn. Disappointed and embattled, the company reached what is now Galveston Bay before being shipwrecked; Narváez died, and the remaining force lost man after man until just three were left besides Cabeza de Vaca. This multicultural crew, one of whom, Schneider guesses, was a converted Jew, the other an African slave, then wandered for thousands of miles until eventually finding a Spanish settlement in western Mexico. Through all of this, Schneider does a solid job of enhancing an intrinsically interesting story without getting in the way.
A you-are-there enterprise in the Steven Ambrose vein, full of surprising turns and not a few ironies.Pub Date: May 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-6835-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
Veteran readers will be visiting familiar ground, but it’s an irresistible story.
In this surprisingly good knockoff of Stephen Ambrose’s classic Band of Brothers (1992), two members of the legendary E Company give their version of events.
Interviewing Guarnere and Heffron for a magazine article coinciding with the 2001 HBO miniseries, the author realized she had the material for her first book. It reads like oral history, with each man chatting alternately for a few pages, but Post provides the firm editorial hand this approach requires. High-school dropouts from impoverished families in Depression-era Philadelphia, both men quit draft-exempt jobs to enlist in the Army’s elite 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Guarnere, who signed up in 1942, delivers a lively account of the brutal, almost sadistic training. A quick learner with a talent for leadership, he was promoted to sergeant before the unit sailed to England in May 1944 to parachute into France the night before the Normandy invasion. Heffron joined his unit as it recuperated in England after the June 6 landing. The men quickly became friends, parachuting into Holland in September for an exhausting three months of fighting in the abortive Operation Market Garden. Their subsequent rest was cut short by December’s Battle of the Bulge, and they participated in the legendary relief of Bastogne, where Guarnere was injured and lost a leg. Heffron continued fighting across Germany until the surrender. Each of them delivers a relentlessly gripping account highlighting heroism, sacrifice and terrible suffering without concealing a good deal of bad behavior. (Looting was universal, and paratroopers often killed prisoners.) Both men returned to Philadelphia after the war and revived their friendship, which still endures. A coda recounts the burst of fame they experienced following the 1998 movie Saving Private Ryan (based on a one-paragraph reference in Ambrose’s book) and then the HBO series.
Veteran readers will be visiting familiar ground, but it’s an irresistible story.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-425-21728-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
A chilling documentation of what happened in Germany when the Nazis seized power and put their ideas on eugenics and euthanasia into action. Burleigh (International History/London School of Economics; coauthor, The Racial State, not reviewed) points out that the Nazi program began with a humanitarian rationalization: Mentally and physically disabled children were subject to ``mercy killing'' as a form of deliverance. Soon, however, ``mercy killing'' evolved into the elimination of ``life unworthy of life'' as the Nazi killing machine expanded to include more and more victims, and as political, legal, moral, and religious opposition was quashed by the fear of reprisals and totalitarian power. Burleigh demonstrates how Nazi eugenics perverted German medicine and science: Scientists approved the sterilization of some 400,000 people between 1934 and 1945 to eradicate ``degenerative heredity'' in order to ``improve the race.'' Doctors, particularly psychiatrists, were encouraged to falsify medical records, give lethal injections, starve patients, and use other creative means of murder while ignoring the age-old dictum of the physician, ``Do no harm.'' Burleigh also details how asylum populations were decimated as managers, bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, nurses, and other professionals, corrupted by monetary awards and promotions, played their parts in the Nazi murder industry. Daily killings became routine as Nazi propagandists extolled social Darwinism. Burleigh describes how victims were targeted, including Jews, foreigners, enemies of the Reich, gypsies, and those who lacked ``labor values.'' Occasional accounts of humanity brighten the grim story, as medical Schindlers saved patients from death by listing them as valuable workers who were badly needed. After the war, some of the Nazi eugenicists, tried at Nuremberg and in German courts, were executed, while others received light sentences. Most melted into the general population under new identities. A notable contribution to the history of Nazi Germany—and a sobering reminder of what can happen when the claims of science, bureaucracy, and expertise go unchallenged.
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-521-41613-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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