A soldier’s spouse reflects on marriage, sacrifice, and patriotic service.
When Cody (Your Soldier Your Army: A Parents’ Guide, 2005) first met her future husband, Dick, she was a high school sophomore enchanted by a dashing West Point cadet. Eventually, that youthful infatuation deepened into something more substantive, and Cody married the man of her dreams. She also embraced a professional soldier, and she quickly discovered the unique sacrifices the role of the Army wife demanded. Even before they wed, Dick was sent on his first assignment to Hawaii and then deployed on a dangerous mission to Guam during the closing days of the Vietnam War. He trained to become a helicopter pilot and was also sent to Saudi Arabia when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Cody learned to manage the stress of the danger and secrecy Dick’s profession entailed and to build a purposeful and busy life that was sometimes necessarily lonesome. She became involved in whatever community she belonged to, worked as a substitute teacher, and eventually earned a pilot’s license of her own. And while she didn’t grow up within a strong religious tradition, she leaned on a newfound faith to cope with the fear of losing her husband to war, an ever present possibility that provoked profound meditations on the meaning of her life. Given Dick’s meteoric rise up the ranks (he eventually became vice chief of staff of the Army) and the extraordinary obligations he had to shoulder, she also learned to cultivate self-sufficiency: “Unlike Dick, who, as he went up in rank and position, had an entourage that grew in relation to the number of stars he acquired, I was always an army of one.” Cody also became readily adaptable, moving 18 times in 33 years. Her two sons followed in their father’s footsteps and joined the military. She then encountered a new source of trepidation: her sons’ deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan during times of war. Written in an unencumbered, conversational style, this book is partly a personal memoir and partly a study of the ways in which civilians make noble sacrifices out of patriotic commitment. Especially given the United States’ many military engagements around the world, this is a timely and thoughtful offering.
An Army wife’s absorbing testament to the power of family and faith to weather difficult times.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-127-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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