A fast-paced account of a little-known POW experience.
The journalist and bestselling popular historian returns with the story of an American soldier who survived Nazi terror.
Generally, Allied POWs in Germany fared better than those in Japan—but not the group that included fighter pilot Joe Moser, Clavin’s subject for this scrupulous, squirm-inducing account. The author narrates from Moser’s point of view, and his sources include Moser’s 2009 memoir. Raised on a farm and fascinated by flying, Moser enlisted in May 1942, underwent the 21 months of training required for the P-38 fighter jet, and flew his first mission in April 1944. Moving back and forth between the big picture and Moser’s 44 missions, Clavin delivers a workmanlike account of the war that ends in August, when Moser’s plane was shot down over France and he was captured. It’s significant that he was taken to Fresnes prison near Paris, where Allied airmen were held, instead of being sent to POW camps. After liberation, in the scramble to evacuate Germany’s high command, a group of soldiers were labeled “terror bombers.” They were crammed into boxcars and shipped to Buchenwald, Germany’s largest concentration camp; by fall, they were starved and disease-ridden. However, when he learned about their plight, a Luftwaffe officer, offended at this illegal treatment of fellow flyers, arranged their transfer to a POW camp. Readers relieved that their ordeal was over will be shocked by what followed in January. With the Red Army approaching, authorities evacuated the camp, forcing prisoners to walk across Germany in a freezing winter with only the food they carried with them. More died than at Buchenwald before arriving at another camp far worse than the one they had left. With Nazi Germany on its last legs, they expected a short stay, but two months passed before liberation. Readers can then enjoy Clavin’s traditional concluding description of the remaining years of the lives of Moser and other major figures.
A fast-paced account of a little-known POW experience.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-15126-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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