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
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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