A well-told memoir of captivity and recovery.
The story of the first female African-American prisoner of war in U.S. military history.
Johnson was a U.S. Army cook attached to the 507th Maintenance Company, a unit of mechanics and technicians in Iraq. On March 23, 2003, she was in a convoy that was ambushed after taking a wrong turn in the city of An Nasiriyah. During an intense firefight, Johnson received bullet wounds in her ankles that rendered her barely able to walk, and several other soldiers were taken prisoner. One of them, the soon-to-be-famous Jessica Lynch, was taken to a different location and was rescued days later. After 22 days, with their Iraqi captors frequently moving them from place to place, Johnson and her fellow POWs were rescued by U.S. Marines on April 13. Johnson and co-author Doyle ably recount her captivity with deftly chosen details. Most striking is the simple decency shown by many people. Several Iraqis, such as the doctors who treated Johnson’s bullet wounds, are portrayed quite sympathetically. “I will do my best to care for you,” the author quotes one as saying. “We must show the world our humanity.” Indeed, Johnson and her fellow prisoners were mostly treated humanely by their captors, who provided them with food, clothing and medical attention. Still, Johnson brings across the brutal stress of being a POW and how it haunted her long afterward. The last section of the book, after she and her fellow POWs are returned to the United States, is perhaps the most unexpected. Johnson became a minor celebrity after her return, but she found that some in the military resented that she was being hailed as a hero. Some even felt that her unit had ineptly lost their way in An Nasiriyah and had thus deserved to be captured. Johnson debunks such accusations while still relating their sting.
A well-told memoir of captivity and recovery.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6748-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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
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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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