Graceful, even elegant, and always eloquent tribute to men at arms in a war that, in a way, never ended.
An affecting memoir, by novelist/journalist Brady (The Marine, 2003, etc.), of service in what is still a strangely forgotten war.
The Korean War followed WWII, and it had no shortage of men willing to fight it; as Brady writes, “some of us went almost eagerly and with a certain dash, having missed the ‘Big War’ and feeling left out.” The young men who did officer training together at Quantico, Va., were a mixed bunch straight out of a WWII movie, but many had elevated pedigrees: there was Punch Sulzberger, for instance, who became publisher of the New York Times, along with future university provost Pete Soderbergh, whose son would become a movie director, and Washington Redskins quarterback Eddie LeBaron, and televangelist-in-the-making Pat Robertson. (Robertson’s father was a U.S. senator, “with sufficient political muscle that his son hinted that the brass would sort of look after him, which stirred resentment among fellow officers and led to tribulations of near biblical proportions for young Lieutenant Robertson.”) Off they went to war, and, fighting in the cold mountains of the two Koreas, many of them died, “raw meat on the end of a stick.” That, of course, is what Marines do, and Brady cautions that you won’t find many pacifists among their kind, though he has become a careful student of war and voices plain criticisms of the wars that have followed his. The present Brady, who is now in his late 70s, meets the younger one on a mission that must have been daunting: a journalistic assignment to revisit the places where he fought and where many of his friends died. His evocation of their lives and his lost youth is most moving, and so, too, are his notes on the passing of former comrades who lived through the war: “The Quantico class of ’51 wasn’t doing so well,” Brady mourns. “Life was closing in on us. Death was.”
Graceful, even elegant, and always eloquent tribute to men at arms in a war that, in a way, never ended.Pub Date: April 20, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33242-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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