The dull-as-dishwater memoirs of a good soldier who rose through the ranks to become the US Army's top noncommissioned officer. Bainbridge enlisted shortly after graduating from high school in 1943. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was taken prisoner by German troops toward the close of 1944. Released at the end of WW II, he returned to his midwestern roots to resume farming. Recalled to active service for the Korean conflict, Bainbridge never left the States. He did, though, acquire a taste for the military life and decided to stay in. Bainbridge (as much a bureaucrat as a warrior) made steady progress in his chosen profession. Following a Vietnam tour, he was given increasingly responsible assignments at a host of duty stations in the US and overseas. In 1975, the author was named Sergeant Major of the Army, a Pentagon-based post he was the first to hold for four years. Mustered out of his beloved Army after 31 years of active service, the ex-noncom (who will turn 70 this year) spent the next 12 years as secretary to the board of commissioners for the US Soldiers' and Airmen's Home in Washington, D.C. Nominally retired, Bainbridge still travels to reunions and armed-forces conferences. Cursed with total recall, he burdens his narrative with inane particulars and minutiae (e.g., detailed rundowns on the quarters he occupied at bases throughout the world, guest lists for long-gone receptions, the routes taken on inspection tours or to reach new duty stations) and heavy-handed tributes to erstwhile COs and colleagues. Save for recurrent assurances about taking good care of the rank and file, he (and Cragg, coauthor of Inside the VC and the NVA, 1992) seldom assess anything remotely resembling a big picture. Autobiographical trivia with all the dramatic appeal of a DoD travel order. (8 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-449-90892-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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
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
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