The combination of Holiday’s recollections and McPherson’s academic expertise creates a valuable addition to the canon of...
A combination of memoir and ethnography study examining an unusual, inspiring aspect of the World War II Pacific campaign.
Holiday is one of the last living Navajo “code talkers,” a group of Native American Marines recruited to develop an unbreakable code derived from their unique tribal language. As co-author McPherson (History/Utah State Univ., Blanding; Navajo Land, Navajo Culture: The Utah Experience in the Twentieth Century, 2002, etc.) observes, “The Navajo code talker experience was as much mental and spiritual as it was physical [due to]…the emphasis Navajo culture placed on religion.” One strength of their collaboration is a clear portrait of the daily challenges faced by the Code Talkers in both training and battle. Holiday’s engaging musings on his hardscrabble (yet tradition-inflected) childhood and the young Navajo males' surreal entry into war alternate with McPherson’s explications of Native American history, symbolism and ritual. The scholar argues that Holiday’s experiences connected these ancient cultural markers to the Marines’ intense “island hopping” campaign against the Japanese. Holiday seems serene in recalling participation in brutal battles at Saipan and Iwo Jima, though he notes that the Code Talkers were frequently at risk of being mistaken for the Japanese foe. Following the war, he overcame “nightmares of the enemy standing over me smiling” by having an “Enemy Way” ceremony performed for him. Still, the Code Talkers found postwar life challenging, having been sworn to secrecy. Since each chapter contains an overview of relevant Navajo symbolism, followed by part of Holiday’s recollection of his improbable life story and McPherson’s lengthy interpretation of the young soldier’s experiences, the overall narrative feels rather unwieldy. However, many readers will find the fusion of military and cultural histories enjoyable and fascinating.
The combination of Holiday’s recollections and McPherson’s academic expertise creates a valuable addition to the canon of specific WWII narratives.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4389-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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