A charming recollection that provides considerable insight into military culture.
A brief memoir of a successful military career and a spiritual journey.
Debut author Maxwell was encouraged to write this remembrance by his only grandson. The author was born in 1935 in Greenville, Tennessee; his father was a civil engineer for the U.S. Army, which meant a peripatetic existence for the family, including a stretch in the Philippines after World War II. Maxwell attended military school in Boonville, Missouri, and then, in 1953, matriculated to Kemper Junior College. He also joined the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps summer camp at Fort Meade in Maryland, which began a long career. After floundering at Missouri University, he headed to Navy flight school in Florida and would eventually fly for nearly 20 years, logging close to 5,000 hours of flight time, including 250 combat missions in Vietnam. He studied German and became a diplomat—the naval adviser to the U.S. ambassador to Germany; it was a position, he says, that provided him with access to various classified information, including details about the Soviet Union. Upon military retirement in 1982, he worked for Airborne Instrument Lab Systems, which made electronics for military aircraft. The culmination of Maxwell’s life, though, was his relationship with Jesus Christ, which he says began in 1976 when his wife announced by letter that she’d become a born-again Christian—somewhat to his chagrin at the time. But he later ended up volunteering for a prison fellowship ministry, which he characterizes as an intimidating but spiritually rewarding experience. Overall, the author’s life is a remarkable one, brimming with accomplishment and adventure, and so it’s ideally suited to a written recollection. Despite the fullness of his life, Maxwell keeps the memoir notably concise, offering a lean catalog of major events rather than an obsessive record of personal minutiae, as is sometimes seen in other memoirs. That said, this remembrance can sometimes read like a narrative curriculum vitae due to the author’s accumulation of professional and educational credentials. Nevertheless, the prose is lucid throughout, and the story, about one man’s admirable devotion to service to his country and God, is genuinely engaging.
A charming recollection that provides considerable insight into military culture.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4908-5086-3
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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