A deep, compassionate group biography of these “unsung heroes” of the Merchant Marines.
An intricate look at the outsized role of a group of Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, families in the dangerous work of the Merchant Marines during World War II.
As former Richmond Times-Dispatch journalist Geroux delineates in this stringently researched study, the Merchant Marines “was not a branch of the military” but rather “an association of privately owned shipping companies operating under the American flag, employing American crews, and fighting like bull sharks over contracts to haul goods by sea.” Thus, they became vitally important in control of the seas when war broke out officially in 1941. Mathews County, Virginia, had a long reputation for producing the most capable mariners, and Geroux spotlights several families whose fathers and sons took the brunt in parrying the German U-boats that hunted in the waters of the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico, disrupting war supplies and oil to Britain and Europe. The author delves into the service of the Hodges family of Gales Neck, whose many sons became merchant mariners, working as independent contractors for the U.S. government who needed to carry the crucial war cargo across the seas. Facing the ramped-up U-boat campaign in the beginning stages, the U.S. did not have the wherewithal to protect the tankers and freighters—until the implementation of the convoy system in mid-summer 1942 after horrible losses at sea such as the sinking of the Onondaga. Geroux offers poignant accounts of these lost men, such as Onondaga’s Capt. George Dewey Hodges, whose remains and ring were soon after found in a captured shark. Sadly, however much the Merchant Marines aided in helping shepherd the convoys across the seas during the war effort, they were locked out of the postwar veterans’ benefits.
A deep, compassionate group biography of these “unsung heroes” of the Merchant Marines.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0525428152
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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