A grand tale told well.
In this notable debut penned by his granddaughter, a World War II veteran recalls action in the Pacific fleet.
Ten months after Pearl Harbor, young but gung-ho Robert J. Steinmetz convinced his parents to sign off on his Navy enlistment. “Steiny,” as Philadelphia working-class buddies called him, plunged from civilian shipbuilder to Shipfitter, Third Class, aboard the USS Gear ARS 34. The Navy issued these sailors only Marine knives for their assignment to plug holes in sinking ships. “Not even worth real weapons,” he concludes—“the lowest of the low.” He survived seven invasions and battles that forever changed him, hiding his anguish from family members for nearly 70 years. Fortunately, Steiny turns out to be a gifted storyteller. Jena Steinmetz, who began this as-told-to memoir as a project for her English degree, deftly captures her grandfather’s language and personality, as if readers are listening across the kitchen table. Despite a number of typos and editorial lapses that seem to have survived the production process, she demonstrates skill and judgment in transforming extemporaneous talk into fluid prose. Sentence fragments fill the book yet enhance conversational tone rather than hinder readability. Dialect, such as “nuttin’ doin’,” flavors the narrative without overshadowing it, and though some characters swear like sailors, it never feels heavy-handed. Steinmetz also uses novelistic techniques to control the presentation, opening with tense sailors below deck hearing gunfire, then backfilling Steiny’s childhood, enlistment and shipmate bonding. Steiny recalls events with remarkable clarity, and as Steinmetz writes with rich detail, summoning all the senses, the short chapters and poignant scenes propel readers, while time shifts help connect wartime and civilian life. A circle of blood on a white parachute evokes the Japanese flag, food tastes like gasoline, melting metal hisses, and rotting corpses, fresh paint and Iwo Jima’s sulfurous odor assault Steiny’s nose. Most painfully, screams of the fallen and handfuls of clinking dog tags haunt him: “It’s the sounds that still scare the man out of me,” he admits. Readers will quickly care about Steiny, making his postwar life relevant in vignettes that range from harrowing to heartwarming.
A grand tale told well.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480031074
Page Count: 312
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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