Though the kidnapping may have been unnecessary, Fermor loved adventure, and he recounts this one with heady enthusiasm.
The great travel writer recalls a daring mission during World War II.
In 1944, working as a British intelligence officer in Crete, Fermor (1915-2011) conceived a plan to kidnap a German general and spirit him away to Egypt for trial as a war criminal. The escapade, he was convinced, would demoralize the Nazi occupiers and raise the spirits of Crete’s resistance fighters. Fermor set his sights on Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, “The Butcher of Crete,” but when Müller was transferred, he chose Heinrich Kreipe, a career soldier who, the author later discovered, was so disliked that the kidnapping was celebrated with champagne in the officers’ mess. The adventure was first chronicled by Fermor’s comrade Billy Moss, whose account, published in 1950, later was made into a movie. More than 15 years later, Fermor decided to write his own version, drawing on war reports he sent to the Special Operations Executive headquarters. Excerpts (comprising about a third of the reports) append the text, as does a guide to the abduction route for military history fans who want to put on sturdy walking boots and follow the rough terrain. By 1966, Fermor was a much-published and praised writer, and his talents certainly are evident in this colorfully rendered tale. The actual kidnapping took little more than a minute, during which the perpetrators stopped the general’s vehicle, pulled the officer out roughly, bound and manacled him, knocked out his driver, and erupted in a “delirious excess of cheers, hugs, slaps on the back.” Transporting their quarry across the island to the sea was more arduous and perilous, involving trekking across snow-covered mountains, hiding in caves, and eluding the enemy. Military historian Roderick Bailey (Target: Italy: The Secret War against Mussolini, 2014, etc.), who provides the foreword, reports coolly that the kidnapping was unnecessary: German morale was already low, and the war had turned in the Allies’ favor.
Though the kidnapping may have been unnecessary, Fermor loved adventure, and he recounts this one with heady enthusiasm.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59017-938-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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