A notable achievement in understanding as well as reporting that pays moving tribute to the men and their town.
Journalist Coyne (Domers: A Year at Notre Dame, 1995, etc.) won the first J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award in 1999 for this thoughtful account of six young men who went to war, came back home, and then had to adjust to new challenges.
The author deftly keeps track of six protagonists and their hometown, Freehold, New Jersey, as the years advance from spring 1941 to the present in a tale that is both portrait and history. Now a New York suburb whose potato fields and orchards have given way to subdivisions and malls, Freehold then was a close-knit town where everyone turned out for the Memorial Day parade, watched the home team play baseball, saw the latest movies at the Strand movie house, and mostly worked at the carpet-weaving mill. The scene set, Coyne introduces the six young men who fought in WWII: Stu Bunton, a radioman on the USS Santa Fe who saw action in the Mediterranean and the Pacific; Walter Denise, a rifleman who served in France and Germany; Jake Errickson, a radio intercept operator stationed in Australia and New Guinea; intelligence officer Jim Higgins; Buddy Lewis, a private in a segregated colored regiment in Europe; and Bill Lopatin, a waist gunner who flew bombing missions from England. Coyne vividly describes their varied war experiences—Denise heroically rescuing the wounded, Lopatin flying more than the usual 50 raids—and their determination to get home alive and get on with their lives. When they did, Freehold was booming, and all six found work. But life changed in the ’50s, and Coyne poignantly details how the men and the town adjusted as the mill closed down, racial tensions intensified, the antiwar movement grew, and fire destroyed the heart of Main Street.
A notable achievement in understanding as well as reporting that pays moving tribute to the men and their town.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-87150-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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