An earnest tribute to unsung heroes.
Memorable account of the Iraq war as experienced by an Army captain and her husband, a helicopter pilot with the 101st Airborne Division.
Kate and Mike Blaise were deployed to Iraq in March 2003. She managed transportation for the 1st Brigade’s 327th “Bastogne” Infantry, which was attacked from within even before entering Iraq when a sergeant who had converted to Islam years earlier lobbed grenades into several tents, hoping to kill as many Americans as possible before they could “rape and murder innocent Muslims.” While Kate’s battalion set up camp at Qayyarah West (immediately dubbed “Q-West”), an abandoned Iraqi airbase that had been bombed by coalition forces, Mike and fellow Air Cavalry pilots provided much needed aerial support to the ground troops. The author’s straightforward prose gives readers an inside look at the difficult conditions in Iraq: wearing heavy gear in 130-degree heat; enduring fierce sandstorms that make breathing all but impossible; worrying about the possibility of biological attack. Life at Q-West was made bearable by the hard work of soldiers and civilians. A makeshift golf course sprang up amid charred debris, making the official list of the PGA; Kate started a newsletter, The Sandy Club Gazette, which boasted a popular French-bashing section; and Iraqi locals opened American-style pizza parlors. Tragically, Mike’s helicopter went down just days before he completed his tour of duty; Kate escorted his body home to Missouri and tried to adjust to her most difficult role yet—widow. Extensive information about the couple’s teenage years and initial Army service round out this story.
An earnest tribute to unsung heroes.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-592-40177-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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