Jacob Marley's injunction that we all bear the chains we forge in life could be the lesson of Cammermeyer's life story. But like Scrooge, she shows that we all have the power to break those chains and find happiness. Cammermeyer, the Army reservist who challenged the military policy on homosexuality, was born in 1942 in Norway and spent her early childhood under the Nazi occupation while her parents participated in the Resistance. The daughter of a stern, undemonstrative father and a subservient mother, she spent her youth in a household where only the male children ``counted.'' After the family moved to America in the early 1950s, she decided to go to medical school, following in the footsteps of her father, a prominent neurological research scientist. When poor grades in college put an end to that dream, Cammermeyer, by then a naturalized citizen, enlisted in the Army, and became a nurse. During a tour of duty in Germany, she met and married her husband, another officer. Though their marriage was plagued from the beginning, she was determined to be a good wife. When her husband was sent to Vietnam, she volunteered as well. Upon returning, both of them, who believed in the US mission in Southeast Asia, were shocked by the naãvetÇ of the American public. Though they raised a family and lived in a dream house, the couple finally divorced when she was 38. A few years later, Cammermeyer finally found fulfillment in a relationship with a woman. She also pursued her military career. During a routine interview for a higher security clearance, she admitted that she was a lesbian and was discharged. She set out to challenge the action in court and was eventually vindicated and ordered reinstated. Appeals continue, however, and she remains out of uniform. Her story is scheduled to appear as an NBC TV movie in February 1995. Cammermeyer tells her story with clarity and sincerity. Despite coauthor Fisher's somewhat repetitive style, the book has a power that brings readers along on this courageous soldier's journey. (16 pages of b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85167-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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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