An excellent primary source for readers of military history, somewhat marred by Carroll’s editorial intrusions.
Poignant letters from American servicemen and their families in the midst of war.
Hindsight plays a major role in reading these letters. Many of the authors featured were dead by the time the addressees received their messages. Writing from the Civil War to the Gulf is included, with the different mentalities of each era shining through. In the War Between the States, writers committ more spelling errors and describe their campaigns extensively, including stories of meeting the enemy in person. In WWI, writers seem bewildered by the events they experience: Bombarded from afar while in trenches or sailing through waters infested with submarines, soldiers and sailors are more likely to describe their cramped living quarters and conditions in medical tents than actual combat. By Korea and Vietnam, servicemen’s letters become filled with appeals to families—either requesting guidance in conflicts they can’t understand or trying to convince Mom and Dad that the Communist menace must be stopped. Heroics are present, too, but in a mundane light. “Before we took the hill, we had a gigantic machine gun duel, and believe it or not, I went to sleep in No Man’s Land for 45 minutes,” writes an infantryman who participated in the invasion of Okinawa in WWII. After the letter, which includes much description of bloodshed, Carroll appends a note saying that military planners at the time expected far worse fighting in the invasion of Japan, which was put off with the development of the nuclear bomb. These notes sometimes provide essential context for the letters they follow, but they also occasionally feel like cheap shots. One becomes enthralled by a desperate, earnest, lonely fighting man’s letter to his wife or parents—then Carroll steps in and tells us that the man died in this or that historic battle. The weakness of the notes is testament to the strength of the letters.
An excellent primary source for readers of military history, somewhat marred by Carroll’s editorial intrusions.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0294-5
Page Count: 476
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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