This account of a search for a father's past is deftly done, avoiding the pitfalls of self-righteousness and paternal aggrandizement. GQ correspondent Richmond (Ballpark, 1993) set out a few years ago to learn about his father's war experiences. Tom Richmond, who died in a plane crash in 1960 when his son was seven years old, was a Marine officer who fought in three savage battles in the Pacific in WW II. He was one of only 74 Marines in that war who were awarded two silver stars. After starting a family of his own, Richmond felt compelled to find out firsthand what his father went through a half-century ago. ``If I were to die knowing nothing about the battles, the truth and horror and beauty of Guadalcanal, New Britain, and Peleliu would have been lost to two generations: mine and my son's.'' So he devoured books on the Pacific war, combed the official Marine records, interviewed many of his father's fellow Marines, and made two trips to the Pacific to visit battlefields. Richmond tells his story well, using an effective mixture of war reporting and personal reflection. His most affecting writing comes in the sections where he describes literally walking in his father's footsteps. This is tricky terrain, but Richmond resists the temptation to idealize his father, offering instead some evocative reporting, spiced with frank, thoughtful ideas about his father's character and legacy and the impact they continue to have on his own life. In the end, Richmond frees himself from the burden of being a hero's son. ``I am relinquishing my father the ideal, and coming to terms with my father the man, and allowing myself, finally—much later than most of the people I know—to let go of him.'' (For a full account of the war in the Pacific, see Eric Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. XXX.) An accomplished work that recreates the horrors of the Pacific in WW II and honors the Americans who fought there.
Pub Date: June 19, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80040-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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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