Enthusiasts of military heroics should enjoy this grueling account of valor.
Inspirational narrative focused on the friendship between Marine Travis Manion and Navy SEAL Brendan Looney, Naval Academy roommates who fell in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2007, co-author Manion, who wrote this book with columnist Sileo, endured the nightmare of any military family: the loss of his son. Following Looney’s death, Manion writes, “it became clear that the story of these two American heroes was representative of an entire young generation of men and women who answered the call to serve.” Manion and Looney were competitive athletes at Annapolis when their futures were reshaped by 9/11: “[With] the stakes for Travis and Brendan much higher, their frequent runs became even more intense.” Manion was first to serve multiple tours, prior to his death while protecting others from a sniper in Fallujah. His loss traumatized the survivors, including Looney, who redoubled his efforts to join the elite SEALs. After his death in a helicopter crash in 2010, their grieving families decided to re-inter Manion to lie alongside Looney at Arlington. The symbolism of their mutual sacrifice was even marked by President Barack Obama in a 2011 address. Readers will undoubtedly respect the dedication of the book’s subjects and the loss borne by Manion, but the storytelling does not match the gravity of its subject. The prose relies on mawkish repetition, emphasizing the heartbreak that came with military service following 9/11: “Americans were still dying in Afghanistan and Iraq almost every week, and many more funerals were expected.” While focused on the anguish caused by the losses of Travis and Brendan, the authors examine Iraq and Afghanistan as a campaign of professional warriors versus evil, a stance that becomes dissonant—though the authors acknowledge the widening gulf between soldiers’ experiences and the perspectives of politicians and the public.
Enthusiasts of military heroics should enjoy this grueling account of valor.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-306-82237-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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