An engaging journalistic account of American military and civilian service during wartime.
A journalist’s anthology of interviews with soldiers from several American wars as well as other patriots.
In his latest book, Wheatley (The Trial of Phillis Wheatley, 2014, etc.) offers a collection of wartime remembrances, mostly told by American veterans. The author largely finds these soldiers close to his home in Scituate, Massachusetts, as many of them were respondents to an advertisement he’s run for years in local newspapers. In one instance, he spotted a sign in front of a house that read “Our Soldier is Home” and returned later to chat with Daniel Hanafin, a U.S. Marine who served in Iraq during the first Gulf War. Although Wheatley personally interviewed most of the soldiers here, he relies on historical records in circumstances in which it simply wasn’t possible; for example, in one welcome expression of historical breadth, he discusses both the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War. The range of Wheatley’s interview subjects is impressive. For example, Estelle Adler served as a volunteer for the Red Cross during World War II, and Mary Regan Quessenberry, who earned a degree in fine art from Harvard University, served in the same war in England as part of an intelligence unit. Ubaldo “Ubi” Di Benedetto was born in Italy and volunteered to serve in the Korean War in order to ultimately remain in the United States. Roger Pompeo is a medical doctor who served in Vietnam as part of the Military Provincial Hospital Assistance Program, which, in part, attempted to win over Vietnamese civilians by providing them with medical care; his perspective on the war is one that’s rarely represented in popular accounts. Maura McGowan Yanosick was never a soldier or volunteer in a war, but she did start a Massachusetts chapter of the Blue Star Mothers, a support group for mothers with children who have served or are serving as soldiers. This work, fashioned over 20 years, is a marvelous testament to the diversity of those who have participated in American conflicts and of their many and sundry expressions of patriotism. One minor quibble is the absence of any discussion of World War I. Nevertheless, this is a valuable historical record of martial valor that’s well-researched, intelligently organized, and lovingly offered.
An engaging journalistic account of American military and civilian service during wartime.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55571-814-5
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Hellgate Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
