A lovely tribute to a father from his son that has limited appeal to those outside the Bradshaw clan.
An eclectic collection of letters from a sailor to his family during and after World War II.
While serving as a sailor in the U.S. Merchant Marine Corps during World War II, Frank B. Bradshaw Jr. faithfully wrote his mother and father, keeping them abreast of his travels and safety. In his first book, Robert W. Bradshaw, Frank’s son, has collected more than three dozen of those letters, from December 1944 to August 1946. The tone of the letters is set immediately; in December 1944, Frank expressed his regret that he didn’t come home for Christmas, an example of the closeness of the Bradshaw family that comes through in every epistle. Sometimes the letters are thrilling, portals into a historically tumultuous time. Frank chillingly describes the “cold-blooded slaughter” of Ukrainians by German soldiers, a vignette of the many horrors on display during the war. While touring Germany, he marveled at both the beauty of the country and the ruin brought to it by battle. “Hamburg was hit the hardest of any city I’ve seen. In some places, there is not so much as a wall standing for miles.” In August 1945, he first communicated the rumors he had heard that Japan was considering surrender and that the end of the war might finally be at hand. Frank’s correspondence also serves collectively as a kind of travelogue, documenting his impressions of locales that must have seemed exotic to a 19-year-old from Memphis. He visited New York City, Panama, London, Cuba, and many more cities and marveled at all the cultural variations. The common theme of the letters seems to be a persistent homesickness and a loving devotion to his family. While always charming, this particular collection will likely interest those who either knew or are related to Frank—the reader looking for fresh historical revelations will be disappointed. Another drawback: much of Frank’s writing is devoted to descriptions of quotidian matters. He provides a running assessment, often replete with detailed menus, of the meals he ate. The editor ends the book with three brief conclusions largely concerned with his view of the connection between God and science; these are difficult to comprehend and bear no obvious connection to the letters.
A lovely tribute to a father from his son that has limited appeal to those outside the Bradshaw clan.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-7185-3
Page Count: 92
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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