Within the frame of this sad family drama, the author delivers deeply technical details of aviation and bomb-making.
A probing, technical exploration of the competition between the two eldest Kennedy brothers that probably drove Joe Jr. to volunteer for his last fatal flying mission.
Author of a range of histories, biographies and management books, Axelrod (Mercenaries: A Guide to Private Armies and Private Military Companies, 2014, etc.) offers both a thorough chronicle of this celebrated family during the years of Joseph Sr.’s stint as ambassador to London as well as a highly specialized look inside the technology that produced the pilotless V weapons (“vengeance weapons”) that terrorized London toward the end of the war. As ambassador from 1938 to 1940—a plum assignment for the former chair of the Maritime Commission that kept him out of President Roosevelt’s hair and far from running for office—Kennedy was known for his pro-appeasement, defeatist stance regarding Britain’s ability to withstand a German onslaught. While his shining eldest son, Joe. Jr., largely held his same isolationist views, his sickly second son, Jack, showed more backbone, according to Axelrod’s assessment of JFK’s 1940 Harvard thesis–turned–first book, Why England Slept. Nonetheless, when war broke out, the two sons vied to volunteer for the more dangerous mission: Jack became a PT boat jockey and made a spectacularly heroic mission in the Solomon Islands when his PT-109 was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Joe Jr., on the other hand, jealous, bitter and itching to distinguish himself, went from training to fly the Martin PBM Mariner “flying boat” to joining the top-secret Project Anvil/Operation Aphrodite strategic flying mission, which targeted the launching fortresses of the V weapons at Pas-de-Calais, France. Using recycled, war-weary B-17s equipped with bombs, the mission employed highly experimental remote-control technology that frequently backfired—in Joe Jr.’s case, on Aug. 12, 1944, his PB4Y-1 blew up over Suffolk. Throughout the book, Axelrod chronicles both the Kennedy family dynamics and the technology of the aircraft.
Within the frame of this sad family drama, the author delivers deeply technical details of aviation and bomb-making.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-137-27904-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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