A biography of aviator Cornelia Fort, from her wealthy Nashville (Tenn.) childhood to her pioneering career as a pilot and early death. Simbeck, a seasoned professional writer, has consulted letters, books, and articles of the time, interviewing many of Fort’s family members and friends. Born in 1919, she grew up on her family’s farm with three older brothers and a younger sister, leading an active, privileged life bound only by the strict rules of her father, a medical doctor, successful businessman, and major landowner—first citizen of the city. After watching the country-fair daredevil acts of early barnstorming aviators, the father made his sons take an oath never to take up flying, but he never reckoned on Cornelia, his feisty debutante-to-be daughter. Against her father’s wishes, she attended progressive Sarah Lawrence College and relished the lifestyle of the rich and famous in nearby New York City. After her father’s death, she broke away from her family’s social restraints and took flying lessons from a veteran aviator, becoming hooked on the freedom of the skies. Later she found herself as a licensed instructor with a student in the air over Pearl Harbor as the Japanese struck. After landing, Fort and the student jumped out and ran for their lives as the plane was riddled with bullets on the ground. Simbeck describes the early days of the US entry into WWII, as about 100 experienced female pilots were invited to form the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS), to transport training planes from factories to air bases to free up men for combat training. Fort tragically died at 24 while trying new formation flying. As the war ended, the 1,100 female pilots were discharged as WASPS (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots). An unusual story of a gallant young spirit who loved her country and died in its service. Another tribute to the “greatest generation” of WWII.
Pub Date: Aug. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-87113-688-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
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