A grieving family ultimately finds closure in this meticulously researched and compelling history.
The plight of three brothers and their mother during one of the most shameful episodes of World War II.
The abandonment of American servicemen in the defense of the Philippines in 1942 propelled Freeman—a former speechwriter and public relations executive and current board chair of The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland—to re-create the tragic story of her uncle, Barton Cross, who suffered a long imprisonment in Japanese POW camps. In a fluid, restrained, and deeply researched narrative, the author returns to the awful chaos just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Cross, a Supply Corps officer on the submarine tender USS Otus, was wounded by shrapnel in the subsequent Japanese air attack on Cavite Navy Base, Manila, and inexplicably left behind by his ship at Sternberg Hospital. Moreover, while Gen. Douglas MacArthur had ordered the evacuation of the Army wounded on the last vessel to depart Manila before the city fell to the Japanese, the 30-some Navy wounded were again neglected. They were eventually transported over the next three years—along with thousands of other captured American servicemen—from one miserable Japanese POW camp to another. “The macabre displays,” writes Freeman, “were intended to humiliate the captured Americans and brandish the new Japanese dominion over the Filipinos.” Meanwhile, Cross’ two older half brothers, Benny and Bill, “lifelong protectors” and “Annapolis-minted officers,” along with their mother, Helen, frantically lobbied to find news of their lost brother, as conditions in the camps were notoriously bad, and several of the POW ships were bombed late in the war by U.S. attacks. Freeman has reopened the long-closed inquiry into her uncle’s account and scoured the diaries and letters that Helen wrote to Washington, D.C., as well as those written by fellow prisoners. The result is an obvious labor of love, a touching, suspenseful, and deeply troubling story of one family’s patriotic devotion and betrayal.
A grieving family ultimately finds closure in this meticulously researched and compelling history.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0414-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
