Frozen in Time by Mitchell Zuckoff

I don't read works of military history that often, and when I do, it usually is one that focuses more on individuals rather than strategy and troop movements. Frozen in Time is my type of popular military history. The book is split into two narratives, or as Zuckoff tells it, "two true stories, one from the past and one from the present." The story from the past is actually comprised of three closely-connected stories of military planes that crash-landed on Greenland during World War II. The other story is that of the present-day effort to find and salvage these lost planes, and to return the remains of the servicemen to their families in the United States. That may have seemed like a spoiler, but it really wasn't. Zuckoff makes it clear pretty early on in the book that some of the servicemen don't make it off Greenland alive.

In November of 1942, a C-53 military cargo plane crashed on Greenland's expansive ice cap, all five men on board the plane survived the crash. A few days later, a B-17 bomber searching for the downed C-53 and its crew crash on the ice cap, as well. The last plane to crash on the ice cap was an amphibious plane called the Grumman Duck. It was also part of the search effort. The Duck belonged to the Coast Guard Cutter Northland. From one chapter to the next, Zuckoff jumps between the stories of these three military planes, giving the reader insight into what caused the planes to crash, introducing the crew members aboard each plane, and detailing the survival efforts after each of the crashes. Zuckoff takes some liberties here and there, but they fall well inside the realm of possibility. For example, after the co-pilot of the B-17 bomber fell into a crevasse, landing about 100 feet below on a large chunk of ice wedge into the crevasse, Zuckoff writes, "Harry Spencer thought he was a goner." Of course, Zuckoff has no way of knowing what Spencer was thinking back in 1942--there is no mention made of a journal or diary. However, it is eminently likely that Spencer thought he was going to die when the crevasse swallowed him up. Zuckoff takes these small liberties throughout the book. While I was usually quick to recognize them, I took little issue with most.

The present-day--2012--portion of the story involves Zuckoff directly. As he was researching about these downed planes, he came across a man who would not only change the direction of this book but also his life. (I'm taking some liberties there... it's kind of fun.) This man was Lou Sapienza, the owner of the exploration company North South Polar Inc. and runs the non-profit organization Fallen American Veterans Foundation. When Zuckoff and Sapienza meet, Sapienza is trying to raise funds to travel to Greenland, locate the Grumman Duck (and possibly the other downed planes), and return these planes and the remains of their crew members to the United States. Zuckoff accompanies Sapienza to meetings with members of various branches of the United States military, and he eventually becomes
part of the exploration team. The way Zuckoff describes it, it sounds as though he bought his way onto the team. It was mutually beneficial: Zuckoff needed material for his book and Sapienza desperately needed money for his venture.

The book's chapters are relatively short, which means that the focus changes every few pages from one downed crew to the next or to the modern-day hunt for the Grumman Duck, which Zuckoff winkingly refers to as the Duck Hunt. Zuckoff does an excellent job of writing about the crew members of these planes. He developed biographies of each man--their physical traits, their personalities, and the lives they left behind back home in the States. Zuckoff found a riveting true story of survival and adventure, and told it very well.

Prague Winter by Madeleine Albright

The sepia-tone picture of a young Albright on the cover may lead you to think of this book as a memoir. This wouldn't necessarily be wrong, depending on your definition of a memoir. However, the subtitle of the book, A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948, provides a better indication of the type of book Prague Winter is.

The book is a personal story, but it is a personal story told by one of the most powerful women of the 20th Century, a woman whose family suffered through harsh conditions during the war. The resulting story is a unique mix of personal, Czechoslovakian , and international history that is at once complex and highly readable.

Prague Winter opens in the 1990s, with Albright discovering that her family has Jewish ancestry, and that members of her extended family perished during the Holocaust. This is the beginning of Albright's incredible personal journey, and she invites readers to join her on her quest for discovery.

Anyone who has done genealogical research knows that it can often be slow going, and that it must be coupled with historical context to give it meaning. Some of this process is replicated in the pages of this book. Albright supplies her readers with the context necessary to fully appreciate and understand her personal story.

Prague Winter is not a simple recollection of memories. It is a multifaceted work of history, both personal and informative. Readers will learn as much about the former Czechoslovakia as they will about Albright and her family.

08 The Remains Of The Day-Kazuo Ishiguro

Written in 1988, the author seems Japanese, and he is. But while he was born in Japan he also grew up in England. He writes in a very specific style. His sentences are elevated to a level of perfection only a British perfectionist could accomplish.

With 8 Academy nominations in 1994, the movie adaptation of The Remains Of The Day seemed to be taken quite well, critically. Let me just say that the movie was horrible. Anthony Hopkins will forever be Hannibal Lector in my mind. And as a butler, this Hopkins’ character would have eaten the leading men of Europe before WWII. This realistic fiction novel takes place in England after WWII. It is a story told by a butler, about his experiences with his employer who was extremely involved in British Foreign policy between WWI and WWII. 

The story is told as a series of journal entries by the protagonist Mr. Stevens, and he thinks his job is the only thing that fills his life with purpose. His opinion of dignity-a seriousness of behavior and a sense of self-respect and pride in ones actions-is the one most important aspect of his existence:

“The story was an apparently true one concerning a certain butler who had traveled with his employer to India and served there for many years maintaining amongst the native staff the same high standards he had commanded in England. One afternoon, evidently, this butler had entered the dining room to make sure all was well for dinner, when he noticed a tiger languishing beneath the dining table. The butler had left the dining room quietly, taking care to close the doors behind him, and proceeded calmly to the drawing room where his employer was taking tea with a number of visitors. There he attracted his employer’s attending with a polite cough, then whispered in the latter’s ear: ‘I’m very sorry, sir, but there appears to be a tiger in the dining room. Perhaps you will permit the twelve-bores to be used?’
            And according to legend, a few minutes later, the employer and his guests heard three gun shots. When the butler reappeared in the drawing room some time afterwards to refresh the teapots, the employer had inquired if all was well.
            ‘Perfectly fine, thank you, sir,’ had come the reply. ‘Dinner will be served at the usual time and I am pleased to say there will be no discernible traces left of the recent occurrence by that time.’” (page 36)

Mr. Stevens is a rather boring man, that lives to work, in opposition to the way I live my own life, I work to live, and try to find joy in my profession along the way. Stevens’ life is his job. He has no social life, no friends, no aspirations or goals. He only cares about his job and making his master happy. The detail and amount of work that go into serving as butler are a bit preposterous. From shining silver, to dusting, to serving dinner, tea, drinks, and ordering other servants around the house. I would never want to be a butler, but while reading the first 30 pages I felt I would have made an excellent butler. I like to think I am one that has “a dignity in keeping with his position”

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

9th July, 1946
Dear Sidney,
I knew it! I knew you'd love Guernsey. The next-best thing to being here myself was having you here -- even for such a short visit. I'm happy that you know all m friends now, and they you. I'm particularly happy you enjoyed Kit's company so much. I regret to tell you that some of her fondness for you is due to your present, Elspeth the Lisping Bunny. Her admiration for Elspeth has caused her to take up lisping, and I am sorry to say, she is very good at it.
Dawsey just brought Kit home -- they have been visiting his new piglet. Kit asked if I was writing to Thidney. When I say yes, she said, "Thay I want him to come back thoon." Do you see what I mean about Elspeth?
Love, Juliet

Writer Juliet Ashton is living in London shortly after the Second World War when she receives a note from Dawsey Adams, a native of the British Channel Island of Guernsey (like the cows!) He saw her name written in a used book he bought and admired it so much that he looked Juliet up to tell her so. And so begins a correspondance between Juliet and the denizens of Guernsey - some of them anyway, mostly the members of a curious club called the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The book is an epistolary novel telling about the very real occupation of Guernsey and the other Channel Islands by Hitler's army in WWII. The letters describe various hardships, kindnesses and acts of heroism on the island during the five-year occupation. They are written directly to Juliet, who is planning to write an article, and then a book, on the occupation. She eventually becomes a pen pal to practically the entire island.

Each of the topics covered in the letters from the Guernseyites to Juliet is related to something that actually happened in the war. The book is fiction but the starvation endured by the islanders, the curfews and strict punishments imposed by the Germans, the concentration camps in Poland that islanders were occassionally sent to, and even the sending away of all the island's children just prior to the occupation were all factual events. Only the personal lives of the Guernsey inhabitants are totally ficitionalized.

The letters find Juliet at a crossroads in her life; 32 and alone, she is practically a spinster by 1940s English standards. She has recently begun dating a roguish American who admires her good looks and fine pedigree and not much else about her. Her paramour is not pleased by Juliet's decision to move to Guernsey to research her book, which has increasingly revolved around the life of one woman. Elizabeth McKenna was the center of the Literary Society in Guernsey, until she was imprisoned in a concentration camp in Europe for hiding a young Polish boy from the Germans occupying the island. There, she dies after striking an overseer for beating another woman.

When Juliet moves to Guernsey she finds herself spending more and more time with the island batchelor Dawsey Adams and Elizabeth's orphan daughter Kit. At book's end, Juliet dumps the American, marries Dawsey and they adopt Kit. Hurray!

This book was a super quick read, partly because it was an engaging novel, and partly because I was in Honduras. Sadly, the original author died before the book was published. Her niece finished it and published the book.

Real Time by Pnina Moed Kass

Spoilers, kind of.

In our post-911 world, it is sometimes hard to remember that terrorists are humans just as we are. This novel was difficult to read because we got to know the terrorists, Omar and Sameh, as well as we get to know their victims. Both boys are sixteen-year-old Palestinians living on the outskirts of Jerusalem. As Sameh tells us, "All over the world sixteen is paradise, opportunity, girls, cars, everything. I watch television in Omar's house and see sixteen... Here sixteen is the magic age of death... A sixteen-year-old is a walking grave. Why give a job to someone about to die? Kids who explode themselves and kill Israelis have no future, so don't give them a future" (22). His family is living in poverty and so Sameh has found work illegally with a Jewish man willing to pay him under the table so that Sameh can provide for his mother and siblings. When Omar tells him that if he becomes a shaheed, a suicide bomber, his family will be provided for forever, Sameh decides to sign on for the task and blow up a bus at a popular stop where there are often a large number of soldiers. When the time comes, Sameh sees that there is a mother with a newborn and cannot go through with the bombing. Unfortunately, Omar is on a van trailing the bus and goes through with detonating the bomb.

The other characters that we get to know are all living on a Kibbutz that they have escaped to for their various reasons. Lidia had to flee from her home in Argentina. Baruch Ben Tov, an elderly Holocaust survivor, finds comfort in his work as the Kibbutz' head gardener. Vera moved to the Kibbutz because her lover had killed himself and she needed to find something that would give her own life meaning after she was left behind. Thomas is a teenager whose Grandfather was a Nazi in WWII that is traveling to the Kibbutz at the beginning of the novel to find out what his grandfather did and to do something positive for the Jewish community as means of some kind of apology he feels that he owes for his predecessors. Vera picks Thomas up at the airport to take him to the Kibbutz but on the way back they both end up on the bus that is Omar and Sameh's target.

Real Time is written so that the perspective is constantly jumping from one character to another so that you get everyone's back stories in bits and pieces and you experience all of their grief and shock in a personal way. Reading the book made me extremely emotional because it was believable and written in a way that the reader could easily become invested in the characters--even the characters that weren't easy to like or understand. What I found to be the most touching was the interaction between Baruch Ben Tov and Thomas. At the beginning of the novel, Baruch is understandably apprehensive about working with a young German boy but still carefully lays out his visitors' room so that he will feel welcome. When Thomas is wounded and in the hospital, Baruch is the one that visits with him and takes care of him, speaking in Thomas' own language to bring the boy comfort despite feeling that the language and everything that went with it has been a harsh intrusion into his own life.

The climax is the bombing of course, but the most significant part of the book is what comes after when the characters are all trying to heal and work their way through what has happened. At the end of the book, a new voice is brought in, and another attack is being planned to illustrate the cycle is never ending. It wasn't the way that I wanted the book to end but given that the world we live in is such a dangerous place it is probably the only way the book could end realistically.

I think that this is a very important text. We often try to protect young adults from the realities of the world that we live in but I don't know that that's what is best for them. I think that exposing them to truth, even if it is through a fictional work such as this, is the best way to help them so that the world doesn't seem as shocking when they have to accept it as it is all at once later on.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

A Separate Peace begins with Gene, the narrator, returning to the boys school where he spent his formative years. As he introduces the reader to the various buildings and features of the school, you get the sense that he has not simply returned to the school to reminisce, but to lay to rest something that he has lived with for many years.

After a few pages, the story hits flashback mode and never really returns to the present. Gene begins to tell the story of Devon School, and more importantly, the story of his friendship with Phineas. Finny and Gene were roommates and close friends, but in many ways they were polar opposites. Finny was athletic and magnanimous, while Gene was neither. Gene received good marks in his classes, while Finny struggled just to pass – often Gene did Finny's homework for him. Although the two were friends, they were also competitive with each other, in a passive aggressive way. As the competition between the two increases, it puts a strain on their friendship. Across the Atlantic, World War II is raging, but the latent one-upmanship between Finny and Gene is just as real of a battle.

With A Separate Peace, John Knowles is saying just as much about the War and the nature of war, as he is about the lives of teenage boys. Knowles makes it clear that the older boys got, the more diligently they were primed for combat. The seniors at Devon School spent a lot of time in physical training, expected to enlist after graduation, or be drafted. The specter of war hung over this New England boys school, permeating the student’s minds and the curriculum alike.

A Separate Peace is beautifully written and laden with vivid, true-to-life characters. The pacing of the book is excellent. It moves along at an even keel, toward a conclusion that is not forgone, but at the same time not necessarily unexpected.
__________________
As a side note, I have to believe that John Irving was influenced by this book when writing A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Berlin, City of Stones by Jason Lutes

(Yes, Alsyon, I did read another comic book. And there's nothing you can do about it!)

It’s hard not to be moved by something written about the holocaust, or simply about war, especially something very well-written. Jason Lutes' Berlin: City of Stones, however, was something surprisingly powerful. Rather than focusing on the plight of Jewish families in war-torn Germany, Lutes writes (and draws) about the tensions between opposing factions in the years leading up to the Second World War. This is one of probably a very small selection of historical graphic novels, and I would wager that it’s easily the best.

If nothing else, Jason Lutes can certainly draw. His grasp of human anatomy and emotion isn’t the best I’ve seen, but all of his figures are stylistically pleasing, and his attention to detail in faces, dress and gestures does a lot in terms of advancing the plot without a narrator. I was impressed by his ability to draw (as far as I can tell) a completely believable 1920’s German cityscape, down to each stone in the road. His bird’s-eye-view opening or closing scenes alternatively give a strong feeling of the city’s European beauty and then of its decrepitude. I found myself lingering over panorama landscapes, picking out individual faces in Lute’s carefully drawn crowds. But it was his impressive ability to pack so much into an image without making it to busy that I found most pleasing about his style.

The story itself follows the dialogue of a few main characters, internal monologues of complete strangers, and first-person narration through journals. The beauty of Lute’s Berlin was that he didn’t have to explicitly guide the reader to conclusions about public discontent, rising discrimination against the Jews, and tensions between National Socialist and Communist worker parties that all come to the point of erupting by the end of the book. But Lutes doesn’t have to show all of this coming to a head; his reader clearly knows how the story ends. I was surprisingly moved by the personal narratives mixed into the story and was made to view the effects of such a grotesque war from a new, very human perspective. I forget which publication rated this as one of the top 10 graphic novels of all time, but I would suggest it to anyone with an interest in a wide range of subjects from the war itself to European architecture. Overall, an unexpectedly strong book, visually and in its plot; Lutes’ drawing and writing style complement each other perfectly to make a powerful end product. I found myself reading it so quickly that I was worried I wouldn’t fully appreciate it, but I couldn’t slow myself down.