An affecting memoir and a convincing plea for pacifism: Steinman’s hypnotizing prose exposes the senselessness of war by...
Steinman travels back in time and across the globe to capture the horrors of WWII as experienced by her father and a Japanese soldier, whom he may have killed.
The author starts with childhood memories of her depressed father, Norman, a pragmatic pharmacist, who, after surviving combat in the Philippines, became emotionally withdrawn from his family. After her parents’ deaths, Steinman discovers the roots of Norman’s melancholy in a collection of candid letters that Norman, as a 27-year-old draftee, wrote to her mother detailing his military days—from his infantry training in Texas in 1943 to his departure from a defeated Japan in 1945. The passionate Norman of the past was frustrated by his separation from his family and the meaningless deaths of his army buddies. He was also terrified of fighting fanatical Japanese soldiers who would prefer to perform hara-kiri––ceremonial suicide––before dishonoring Emperor Hirohito with their surrender. Norman’s chronology is interspersed with Steinman’s own eloquent reflections in which she divulges her new sympathy for the repressed man who raised her. The narrative becomes more intriguing when Steinman finds an unsettling souvenir among the letters: a blood-stained Japanese flag, which bears the name of a soldier, Shimizu. Hoping to help others deal with grief, Steinman goes on a quest to return the flag to Shimizu’s surviving family. Traveling to Japan and the Philippines, Steinman locates the graves of Norman’s unlucky war buddies. She also forms friendships with Japanese citizens of Shimizu's hometown, who help her realize the heinous aftermath of America's atom-bomb attack on Hiroshima. During her journey, Steinman both unearths a complex portrait of the real Norman and acquires empathy for the postwar woes of the Japanese.
An affecting memoir and a convincing plea for pacifism: Steinman’s hypnotizing prose exposes the senselessness of war by showing how conflicting governments have destroyed families by ripping common people out of their homes and forcing them to kill each other.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-310-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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