A modest contribution compared to such classics such as Dispatches and A Rumor of War, but worthy of attention all the same.
A departure for Pulitzer Prize–winner Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains, 2003, etc.): a memoir recounting his time in Vietnam as a green lieutenant turned world-weary REMF.
Fresh out of Robert Fitzgerald’s creative writing seminar and the hip Cambridge scene, Harvard grad Kidder didn’t want to go to Vietnam, and for a time it looked like he wouldn’t have to—until the callow ROTC kid managed to irritate a colonel. Kidder finds himself dispatched in country to a behind-the-lines intelligence unit sorely short on the niceties of Army discipline. No sweat to him: “Why should I care if some of the men didn’t shave some mornings or the jeep needed paint? I hadn’t come here to harass troops. I opposed this war.” (The book’s nicely double-edged title says it all about his youthful self’s attitude.) Even so, he meets with ribbing, scorn and near-mutiny from many of his men. They come to accept him, though, and even to straighten up a little bit when he responds to a night attack by turning out wearing “steel pot and flak jacket and .45”—and nothing else. In this short account, Kidder concentrates on the absurdities of Army life, relating episodes in which he figures as a Yossarian surrounded by strange people who seem not to understand that what they’re doing is dangerous. The narrative, gracefully written and full of rueful, black humor, takes its time in gathering steam, but Kidder punctuates his leisurely account with zingers, like a scarifying letter to his onetime girlfriend, and bittersweet moments such as a visit to a Singapore brothel. Best of these is an encounter long after the war with one of his men, a Chicano boy who once reminded him in the field, “We can shoot you any time we want, Lieutenant.” The kid made it back home, only to return to Vietnam with the CIA.
A modest contribution compared to such classics such as Dispatches and A Rumor of War, but worthy of attention all the same.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-50615-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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