A detached, dead-honest memoir of WW II from a distinguished scholar who, though he survived scores of aerial combat missions against the Japanese, focuses on the Stateside experiences that attended his coming of age. At present, Hynes is Woodrow Wilson professor of literature at Princeton; he's also the author of such works as The Edwardian Turn of Mind and The Auden Generation. There is, however, not a word about his postwar life and career in the consistently engaging text. Hynes simply provides a self-contained first-person account of the stirring journey that took him at age 19 in 1943 from Minnesota's farm country to the Navy's air-cadet program and beyond. As a fledgling aviator, Hynes trained chiefly at makeshift military bases near tank towns in America's Sunbelt. When posted to an established installation like Pensacola, Fla., he vaguely appreciated its permanence and traditions. Apart from learning to fly and to finesse the ancillary rigors of pilot training, though, the author's main concern was the pursuit of pleasure in his off-duty hours. In evocative detail he recalls the camaraderie that was nurtured in gin mills from Memphis to Honolulu as well as the drunken escapades which created morning-after legends to flight lines half a world away. Hynes opted to take his commission in the Marine Corps rather than the Navy for reasons he's not quite sure he understands to this day. Before shipping out to the Pacific as a torpedo-bomber pilot, the author took to wife the sister of a fellow officer from Birmingham, Ala. They had a few months "playing house" near Santa Barbara, but whether the marriage endured or became just another war casualty is unclear. Indeed, Hynes devotes more space to recapping the lyrics of bawdy barracks and bar-room ballads than to recalling wedded life on the run. He closes with his return to the US months after V-E Day. Unsentimental, understated reminiscences that deliver a true record of the glorious, degrading, ludicrous, tedious, appalling, and other aberrant elements that constitute military manhood in time of war.
Pub Date: March 1, 1988
ISBN: 0142002909
Page Count: 276
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1988
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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