by Ruth N. Spooner ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 18, 2016
A sweet, nostalgic remembrance of a woman’s military adventure.
A debut memoir recounts nine weeks spent in basic training in the Air Force, told through correspondence.
Spooner was born in 1936 in Milford, Connecticut, a small town that couldn’t contain her youthful wanderlust. The author was eager to travel the world, but her family’s modest financial resources made college seem unrealistic. Then serendipity struck: at a gathering of her church youth group, a representative of the Women in the Air Force spoke in the hopes of finding new recruits. Spooner’s interest was piqued, and once she turned 18, in 1954, she signed up. She later left by air for New York City—her first time on a plane—with Texas as the ultimate destination. The remembrance is largely an epistolary one, told through letters exchanged by the author and her mother. Each chapter coincides with a week of basic training in 1955, making for nine chapters in all. Others contribute letters, too—one is written by the mother of her best friend on the base to Spooner’s mom—but the running dialogue between mother and daughter is the narrative fulcrum of the recollection. Spooner describes in minute detail her life on the base—the military regulations, her scandalously flirtatious peers husband hunting, and her generally busy and extremely regimented daily routine. The letters vacillate subtly between homesickness and excitement, though the tenor is consistently an endearingly optimistic one. Even mundane chores are drawn in cheerful colors: “Oh, I must tell you! Today we were drilled by another T.I. who was very comical.” Spooner’s experience is a largely happy one, and she proudly reports how often her flight group won the “Honor Plaque” for passing inspections with the least “gigs” or mistakes. As graduation approached, she was assigned to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., to work as a typist. As Spooner herself observes in the preface, this is an intensely personal book that will largely interest those who know her, though she does provide a microscopic view into a woman’s life in the military in the mid-20th century. Spooner’s writing is unfailingly clear and her lighthearted ebullience is infectious. The book as a whole is a pleasant, brief portal into a teenage innocence now so unfamiliar it seems almost exotic.
A sweet, nostalgic remembrance of a woman’s military adventure.Pub Date: July 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-4665-5
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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