A provocative examination of the Pararescue Jumpers, a little-known Air Force/Air National Guard unit that performs both military and civilian rescues, lavishly detailed here. Brehm, a —PJ— for 20 years, wisely allowed magazine writer Nelson to frame his life story in the context of recent PJ history in a distanced third-person mode. The genre’s signature workmanlike prose style clarifies the weathered humanity of Brehm and his fellow PJs, and their rueful altruism in their hazardous work. The authors lead us through the American military’s delayed development of viable parachute units up to the Vietnam era, when the PJs established a benchmark by rescuing a large number of downed flyers behind enemy lines (as not long ago in Kosovo). Brehm’s experience—he joined in the mid-1970s as a skinny kid with a huge Afro—is presented as typical of the harrowing training regimen, which —washes out— nearly 90 percent of PJ applicants and essentially combines the separate specialty schools of the Green Berets, SEALs, and other elite units. The authors also go into technical detail in depicting the PJs— arcane equipment and tactics. The welter of information is anchored by gripping depictions of rescue at sea, in major storms, and on Mount McKinley (including incidents in which PJs are lost in action)’seemingly tailor-made for The Perfect Storm’s demographic. Yet beneath such gung-ho antics lurk disquieting social questions and echoes of class inequity, as in the PJs— shamefully low salaries and their high loss rate. Similarly, Brehm and Nelson provide a rare portrait of Long Island as something other than a playground for the suburbanized rich, affectingly emphasizing the blue-collar and nautical communities, like Brehm’s large family and his L.I.—based unit, which have underwritten the region’s history. A macho page-turner with resonance and heart that rescues a cadre of rough everyday heroes from undeserved obscurity. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-609-60504-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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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