A gripping and often charming wartime story.
An autobiographical novel about an American medic’s experiences in World War II.
Paul Kramer grows up in Dorchester, a neighborhood of Boston, and in 1943, at age 18, enlists in the U.S. Army. He’s shuttled to Virginia’s Camp Pickett for basic medic training, where he’s shocked by the brazenly contemptuous enforcement of racial segregation. Although he struggles with the food during training—he’s Jewish and strictly observes kosher dietary restrictions—he distinguishes himself enough to be sent to medical and surgical technicians’ school at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis for an intensive 10-week course. He then travels to Scotland by ship through waters populated by German submarines, and he’s later sent to England. After discovering a black-market operation within the ranks, he’s assigned to a military police battalion and given combat instruction by British Special Forces. He’s eventually sent to France and hand-picked for a clandestine reconnaissance mission with French Resistance fighters. His experiences abroad are remarkably eventful—he meets generals George S. Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower, plays jazz piano for British aristocrats, and is serenaded by singer Dinah Shore. Kramer’s military career is also notably honorable: he participates in a mission to save a captured colonel and later gets a Purple Heart. Debut author Kozol says that he wrote this book as a personal memoir but changed some names to protect the anonymity of many of the people he knew. However, the story is told in the third person, his own name is changed to “Paul Kramer,” and the reasons for these unusual authorial decisions are never made clear—or even remarked upon. The book also episodically reflects on the protagonist’s childhood and his life after the war—he becomes an optometrist—but its best moments are in its tales of war abroad, which are consistently engrossing throughout. The prose style is clear, if unremarkable, and the author appears to excise some of the grittier aspects of his experience, including expletives, which makes the work as a whole feel bowdlerized at times. That said, the story itself is as good as anything a novelist could conjure from his or her imagination.
A gripping and often charming wartime story.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4808-4303-5
Page Count: 545
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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