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THE JERSEY BROTHERS

Name: THE JERSEY BROTHERS
Author: Sally Mott Freeman
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0414-5

A MISSING NAVAL OFFICER IN THE PACIFIC AND HIS FAMILY'S QUEST TO BRING HIM HOME

by Sally Mott Freeman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 2017

A grieving family ultimately finds closure in this meticulously researched and compelling history.

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The plight of three brothers and their mother during one of the most shameful episodes of World War II.

The abandonment of American servicemen in the defense of the Philippines in 1942 propelled Freeman—a former speechwriter and public relations executive and current board chair of The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland—to re-create the tragic story of her uncle, Barton Cross, who suffered a long imprisonment in Japanese POW camps. In a fluid, restrained, and deeply researched narrative, the author returns to the awful chaos just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Cross, a Supply Corps officer on the submarine tender USS Otus, was wounded by shrapnel in the subsequent Japanese air attack on Cavite Navy Base, Manila, and inexplicably left behind by his ship at Sternberg Hospital. Moreover, while Gen. Douglas MacArthur had ordered the evacuation of the Army wounded on the last vessel to depart Manila before the city fell to the Japanese, the 30-some Navy wounded were again neglected. They were eventually transported over the next three years—along with thousands of other captured American servicemen—from one miserable Japanese POW camp to another. “The macabre displays,” writes Freeman, “were intended to humiliate the captured Americans and brandish the new Japanese dominion over the Filipinos.” Meanwhile, Cross’ two older half brothers, Benny and Bill, “lifelong protectors” and “Annapolis-minted officers,” along with their mother, Helen, frantically lobbied to find news of their lost brother, as conditions in the camps were notoriously bad, and several of the POW ships were bombed late in the war by U.S. attacks. Freeman has reopened the long-closed inquiry into her uncle’s account and scoured the diaries and letters that Helen wrote to Washington, D.C., as well as those written by fellow prisoners. The result is an obvious labor of love, a touching, suspenseful, and deeply troubling story of one family’s patriotic devotion and betrayal.

A grieving family ultimately finds closure in this meticulously researched and compelling history.

Pub Date: May 16, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5011-0414-5

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.