This epistolary relationship is a throwback to an era of kinder, gentler romances. Mirren Barford and Jock Lewes met in 1939, when Mirren was at Oxford and Jock in the army, and they began a courtship that would last three years, through rejections (on both sides) and long separations. But the number of times they strolled Joy Street together (their secret code name for the occasions they met) never reached double digits. Still, much can be conveyed in letters, especially in wartime. Mirren and Jock shared thoughts about courage and duty, love and lustthis last always discreetly hidden in metaphorand through their correspondence fell in love. They became engaged while Jock was serving in North Africa, an officer and cofounder of the Special Air Service, described at the time as ``Britain's most romantic, most daring and most secret army,'' and Mirren was still at school. Tragically, Jock never came home. Mirren's letters were returned to hermany unread because of the long mail lag between England and North Africa. After her death in 1992, her son, Michael Wise, found the letters, and the result is this volume, a collection of the writings of two ordinary people who lived through an extraordinary time and through it became extraordinary themselves. The letters reflect this change, beginning as a flirtation and deepening into a relationship that was loving and philosophical, a process accelerated by the war. Haunted by the prospect of imminent death, Jock proposed: ``Just say yes, you'll marry me when I'm a proper Captain and I won't ask you to put it in the papers because I might never become a captain and then people would say ha ha, or else I might die and then they would say poor dear, and both are horrid, I think.'' Like a black-and-white war film: sweet, a little corny, unbearably sad.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-94767-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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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