This account of a search for a father's past is deftly done, avoiding the pitfalls of self-righteousness and paternal aggrandizement. GQ correspondent Richmond (Ballpark, 1993) set out a few years ago to learn about his father's war experiences. Tom Richmond, who died in a plane crash in 1960 when his son was seven years old, was a Marine officer who fought in three savage battles in the Pacific in WW II. He was one of only 74 Marines in that war who were awarded two silver stars. After starting a family of his own, Richmond felt compelled to find out firsthand what his father went through a half-century ago. ``If I were to die knowing nothing about the battles, the truth and horror and beauty of Guadalcanal, New Britain, and Peleliu would have been lost to two generations: mine and my son's.'' So he devoured books on the Pacific war, combed the official Marine records, interviewed many of his father's fellow Marines, and made two trips to the Pacific to visit battlefields. Richmond tells his story well, using an effective mixture of war reporting and personal reflection. His most affecting writing comes in the sections where he describes literally walking in his father's footsteps. This is tricky terrain, but Richmond resists the temptation to idealize his father, offering instead some evocative reporting, spiced with frank, thoughtful ideas about his father's character and legacy and the impact they continue to have on his own life. In the end, Richmond frees himself from the burden of being a hero's son. ``I am relinquishing my father the ideal, and coming to terms with my father the man, and allowing myself, finally—much later than most of the people I know—to let go of him.'' (For a full account of the war in the Pacific, see Eric Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. XXX.) An accomplished work that recreates the horrors of the Pacific in WW II and honors the Americans who fought there.
Pub Date: June 19, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80040-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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
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
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