A lucid study of a well-remembered war’s forgotten soldiers.
A sympathetic, wide-ranging look at unseen casualties of World War II—those psychologically damaged by battle.
The last battle of the men and women traumatized by combat was fought, writes Childers (History/Univ. of Pennsylvania; In the Shadows of War: An American Pilot’s Odyssey Through Occupied France and the Camps of Nazi Germany, 2003, etc.), not “on the fields of Europe or on the jungle islands and coral atolls of the South Pacific, but on the main streets of American towns.” Hundreds of thousands of soldiers came back shattered, suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder and all that malady can bring, from difficulties holding jobs and maintaining relationships to substance abuse, mental illness and criminal behavior. None of this is news, of course; the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives limns the larger outlines of that story. Childers digs deep into the historical data, however, to show how widespread the alienation of the much-heralded Greatest Generation was after the war had ended, when more than two million veterans found themselves at home but out of work and without much to do. They had given the best years of their lives to their country, but now felt more than a little disgruntled about the experience. The passage of the GI Bill helped, as did a reviving economy that put veterans back to work. But the more seriously damaged soldiers, including one from Childers’s hometown to whom he pays touching homage, remained outsiders forevermore—and, as he notes, some are only now being diagnosed with PTSD, 65 years after the war’s end. Hardest of all for many, he writes, was the shame of having survived under terrible conditions to return to safety, “surrounded by the omnipresent family, stumbling over one another, everyone striving to behave well.”
A lucid study of a well-remembered war’s forgotten soldiers.Pub Date: May 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-618-77368-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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