An account of a genuinely inspiring deed written as a breathless docudrama.
The story of a mission over North Korea in 1950 when, in an almost suicidally brave gesture, a Navy pilot tried to pull his friend from burning wreckage.
Given the subjects—pilots Tom Hudner, white, and Jesse Brown, black—many authors would be tempted to write an inspiring story of racial tolerance, the brotherhood of warriors, and patriotic sacrifice. Journalist Makos (co-author: A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II, 2012) yields to that temptation, resulting in worshipful biographies of two men who overcame adversity to achieve their dreams as Navy pilots, bonded despite vastly different backgrounds, and risked their lives for freedom. The book, writes the author, is “an inspirational story of an unlikely friendship. It’s the tale of a white pilot from the country clubs of New England and a black pilot from a southern sharecropper’s shack forming a deep friendship in an era of racial hatred.” Brown died in his plane, and the author’s interviews with those who knew him turn up only good things. He endured humiliating racial persecution but excelled at school, worked his way through college, enlisted in the Navy, and became the first black carrier pilot. Raised in a prosperous Massachusetts family, Hudner had an easier time achieving his dream, but Makos’ portrait of him is equally admiring. Their final flight took place to support Marines trapped around the frozen Chosin Reservoir, and Makos detours regularly for shorter biographies of several who fought and suffered on the ground. For more than half the book, the author describes peacetime service of a naval band of brothers: training, camaraderie, horseplay, etc. There follows the stories of two months of ground-attack missions culminating in the action that won Hudner the Medal of Honor.
An account of a genuinely inspiring deed written as a breathless docudrama.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7658-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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