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Sto caricando le informazioni... The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War (2001)di Louise Steinman
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. Louise Steinman's fine memoir/biography cum history, THE SOUVENIR, is a carefully researched and lovingly told look into her late father's experiences as a soldier in the South Pacific theater of operations during WWII. She wanted to understand her father's silence about those years and she found an entry through a cache of letters he wrote to his wife (her mother) and a tattered and bloodstained Japanese flag he'd sent home - the 'souvenir' of the title. Steinman did her homework, in that she mixed the personal with the historical in such a way that a reader can follow her father's bloody and traumatic path of battles fought in the mountains of the Philippines. History buffs will especially appreciate her efforts in this. I was probably more interested in the personal side, the Norman Steinman part. Like the passage where he writes of the Russian adage, 'Nichevo,' which became his coda, a way in which to endure the constant threat and presence of death that surrounded him every day, taking his dear friends and comrades. Nichevo means, quite literally "nothing." Or as the combat-hardened veterans of Vietnam came to say, "It don't mean nothin'. Drive on." In reading the stories here, both Louise's and her father's, I was reminded of a couple other books. One was Steve Luxenberg's ANNIE'S GHOSTS. Luxenberg's research turned up some disturbing secrets about his own father's service in WWII (also in the Philippines). The other book is Ethan Canin's fine novel CARRY ME ACROSS THE WATER, about another journey from the present back into those trauma-ridden times of the war with the Japanese. THE SOUVENIR, however, can stand on its own very well. A fine and readable story by a devoted daughter and a gifted writer. I will recommend it highly. I expected an epistolary and this was not. The author did do a great deal of research and the material itsself is very interesting. I especially liked the fact that she made the trip to Luzon and to Japan. I was offended by her references to "propoganda". Too bad she wasn't her husband's age, (and mine) durring WW2. I think her father might have been offended too. Story of a woman who, when both of her parents die within a short time of each other, comes into possession of an army footlocker full of letters that her father had written to her mother while he was in the army in the Pacific during WWII. Hundreds of letters! With these letters is a blood-stained Japanese “good luck” flag with an inscription she doesn’t understand. Slowly the story of her family unfolds as the author comes to know the man who was her father as she had never seen him before—before the war, before having the experiences that he did. Also told is the story of the author’s pursuit of the family of the young man to whom the flag belonged in Japan. Wonderfully done, difficult to stop listening to. I’m not a big WWII history fan, although my own father was there, albeit on the European front. I did have an uncle, one of my mother’s brothers, who was killed in the Pacific, so this certainly did have some family relevance to me even though I never met Uncle Cliff. Reading the description of this book made it sound like an interesting story—and something different than my usual fare, and indeed it was on both counts. Highly recommended, especially for those who enjoy memoirs nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
Louise Steinman’s American childhood in the fifties was bound by one unequivocal condition: “Never mention the war to your father.” That silence sustained itself until the fateful day Steinman opened an old ammunition box left behind after her parents’ death. In it she discovered nearly 500 letters her father had written to her mother during his service in the Pacific War and a Japanese flag mysteriously inscribed to Yoshio Shimizu. Setting out to determine the identity of Yoshio Shimizu and the origins of the silken flag, Steinman discovered the unexpected: a hidden side of her father, the green soldier who achingly left his pregnant wife to fight for his life in a brutal 165-day campaign that changed him forever. Her journey to return the “souvenir” to its owner not only takes Steinman on a passage to Japan and the Philippines, but also returns her to the age of her father’s innocence, where she learned of the tender and expressive man she’d never known. Steinman writes with the same poignant immediacy her father did in his letters. Together their stories in The Souvenir create an evocative testament to the ways in which war changes one generation and shapes another. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)940.54History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- Military History Of World War IIClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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Steinman goes over the motivations for the US's use of atomic weapons and the mood in Japan in hindsight. Steinman's father was in the 25th Infantry Division. He worked in headquarters and showed great respect for his frontline brothers. Steinman was fully expecting to die in any invasion plan of the Japanese mainland. This book is an attempt to understand her father's silent attitude by understanding the war wounds inflicted on him during the battles against the Japanese occupiers in the Philippines. Steinman, writing in 2001, says that neither the Japanese and the US ever apologized either for the Pearl Harbor attack nor the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings. Sadly in 2016 Obama went to Hiroshima and focused on the tragedy of Hiroshima as a reason to rid the world of nuclear stockpiles. He never spoke about the reason the US entered the war in 1942. Obama said that our racist history was part of the continuum of violence that led to Hiroshima. ( )