Not great literature by any means, but likely to interest students of aerial warfare and WWII history.
A memoir of high-altitude warfare by a well-known figure in WWII history.
The Memphis Belle was one of the new generation of long-range bombers developed by Boeing Aircraft at the start of WWII, a plane that first-time author Morgan and collaborator Powers (Flags of Our Fathers, not reviewed) lovingly describe as “silver and elegant and indomitable-looking on the tarmac, bristling with armature, that massive reassuring tailfin crowning its splendid architecture.” Powers piloted it and a crew straight out of a Hollywood movie (Clark Gable, in fact, came along for a ride while he was making training films for the Air Corps) for an impressive total of 25 bombing runs over Nazi-occupied Europe—impressive because the odds were very much against any plane’s surviving for so long (as Morgan notes, 82 percent of his original bomber group had been blown out of the sky within the first two years of the war). When the Memphis Belle completed its 25th mission on May 17, 1943, plane and crew were sent on a barnstorming tour of America to promote the war effort and sell government bonds. Not content to remain behind the lines, Morgan pressed to be reassigned to the Pacific: “I had some payback I needed to deliver to the Japanese for what they did to us at Pearl Harbor,” he explains. Payback he got. Under General Curtis LeMay, he planned and executed the hellish 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, using a napalm bomb “of fiendish effectiveness” that killed or badly wounded more than 120,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians in the space of an hour. Morgan narrates these results with an unsettling satisfaction and no apparent remorse—a tone that will trouble some readers but may satisfy others.
Not great literature by any means, but likely to interest students of aerial warfare and WWII history.Pub Date: May 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94610-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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