Books on dogs who served in war make up a minor genre. This account will appeal to dog lovers and history buffs who can...
An enthusiastic dual biography of a man and his wartime animal companion.
A Czech volunteer in the French Air Force, Robert Bozdech crashed in no man’s land at the beginning of WWII. Returning to friendly lines, he discovered a puppy in an abandoned house and kept it throughout his service, including four years of missions for the Royal Air Force. With access to Bozdech’s papers and unpublished memoirs, journalist Lewis (co-author: Sergeant Rex: The Unbreakable Bond Between a Marine and His Military Working Dog, 2011, etc.), who has reported from war and conflict zones for a variety of news outlets, delivers a detailed narrative. Named Antis, the dog was impressively loyal, intelligent and stoic. It accompanied Bozdech in the headlong retreat across France after the Nazi invasion and cooperated as his master smuggled him aboard a ship to Gibraltar and then another to Britain (pets were forbidden). Antis smuggled himself aboard his master’s bomber and flew several missions over Europe before being severely injured by flak. He was also buried in rubble for several days after a bombing attack, shot by an angry farmer for chasing sheep, and suffered nearly fatal cold injury due to the fact that he waited beside the runway for Bozdech’s return, often for days, refusing food and ignoring rain and snow. His presence was no secret to the British media, who made him a national celebrity, and he later received the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross. Bozdech himself was equally impressive, completing his missions in Bomber Command (only half survived) and then completing another turn in the Coastal Command.
Books on dogs who served in war make up a minor genre. This account will appeal to dog lovers and history buffs who can tolerate the florid novelization and fictionalized dialogue.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3914-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
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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