No comments about Growing in His Light.

5 comments about The Little Monster: Growing Up With ADHD.

1. I read the book in one day. It was very engaging and I went through the whole array of emotions as I read it. Reliving alot of similar moments for I am a Mom with twin boys that have been diagnosed with ADHD. I love to read, however the books on ADHD that I have read have been of little value. As Robert shares his story and his perspective it helped me understand my boys even better. The book may not have all the answers, but it did share some of the discoveries that Robert made on his own. In order to find ways to improve their self esteem, it helps to understand how society tears it down. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand a person with ADHD traits.



2. This book was phenomenal!! It is the story of my life and I am glad I am not alone.
   I encourage all adults who think or know that they have attention deficit to read this.
   The book encouraged me to accept me for who I am and start my own chapter for ADHD in my own city.



3. The Little Monster: Growing Up With ADHD
   The Little Monster by Robert Jergen is a great read! The book takes the reader inside the head of Dr. Jergen, who has ADHD, and lets the reader see and feel what is like to have ADHD. This story will both touch and delight you as you read it. Most importantly though, this book will both teach and give you hope whether you have ADHD or are a parent or teacher for someone who has ADHD. Dr. Jergen gives the reader workable solutions to everyday problems as well as other referral sources for parents and teachers. When Dr. Jergen entered into his doctoral program, he discovered and wrote this, "The question became, not how to "cure" my ADHD, but how to utilize it."



4. I found this book to be very useful in seeing the world from an ADHD child and adult's perspective. But the author seems to feel that the entire world needs to shift to accommodate what seems natural to him. It seems that everyone must tolerate and indeed celebrate behavior that makes life unpleasant and difficult for the non-ADHD person who has the bad luck to work with an ADHD adult.
   
   I came away from the book feeling sad for ADHD children and their parents and their poor teachers who have delivered into their classrooms the "gift" of an uncontrolled child. And I am profoundly grateful that I don't work with an ADHD adult.
   
   It would have been nice to read more about how the author tries to accommodate others and less about how the world must warp to fit him.



5. I highly recommend this book to parents, teachers and anyone interested in learning more about ADHD. I am actually currently taking my Masters in Special Education and this book was a wonderful source of information. It is a very powerful book where the author talks about his personal experience growing up with ADHD. All parents of kids with ADHD should read this book because after this experience they will definitely understand better their kids' behavior. I congratulate the author for sharing his personal experience and for showing through his writing how parents and teachers have a crucial role in developing kids' self - esteem

5 comments about The Growing Seasons: An American Boyhood Before the War.

1. I was hooked from line one of this book. Hynes' simple and direct style of writing quickly whisks you back 70-plus years and tells you -shows you - how it was. And it wasn't easy for Sam Hynes either, orphaned at an early age and moving from place to place, being farmed out and coping with a step-mother. But in spite of all this, you also get a sense of the fun of being a boy in the midwest during the depression. Kids don't always know when they're poor; they're too busy learning and experiencing things and trying to get the most out of every day. The sequel to The Growing Seasons is equally good: Flights of Passage. I wish Sam would continue his personal story and tell us what happened after he came home from the war. I do know from talking with him that he was back in the Marines during Korea. There's gotta be another great story in there somewhere. If you're from the midwest and love good storytelling, read this book. Hell, you don't have to be midwestern. It's just darn good writing. - Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy: At Play in the ASA



2. First of all, this is a very enjoyable book. I wanted to read this because my Father grew up in the Midwest during this time frame in a similar city. While he did grow up under very different financial circumstances, I was interested in exploring the every day experiences that a young boy would live through.
   The book is excellently written and vividly tracks a boys life in a world few can ever understand if you did not live during the Depression Era of the '30's. This being said, the book left me with many questions.
   
   His brother Chuck is hardly mentioned at all. Why? Dr. Hynes does not really go into how well, or badly he did at school. That would have been interesting. What happend to the boy that ran the girl over with his car. His friends were not the kind of kids I would want my children hanging around with. It is amazing he did not do some time in reform school. I also would have liked to have known at the end, what happened to his Father and Stepmother as well as his Stepsisters.
   
   Anyway, it was fun to read and I surely learned more about this time than I ever did in History classes.
   
   I hope that you will enjoy it.



3. The now storied "Greatest Generation" did not come full-blown into glory. It evolved from childhood, and Samuel Hynes' gentle, understated and illuminating memoir, "The Growing Seasons," assists in our understanding of how the generation that fought and won World War II came to be. Fiercely independent, perpetually inquisitive and unabashedly self-conscious, Samuel Hynes comes of age in America's heartland during the Great Depression. His story, crafted with gentle humor and exquisite detail, gains transcendence and slowly emerges as a representation of millions of youngsters grappling with the age-old obligation of developing an identity, but doing so in an era of frayed innocence and material dispossession.

   Loss and impermanence permeate Hynes' childhood. His father stoically accepts the death of his wife, unemployment as a result of a contracting economy and his own inability to serve the nation he so deeply loves. This unspoken patriotism and sense of place nurture the young Hynes, who never overcomes the gaping wound of losing his mother to a premature death. Motherloss uproots the Hynes' family; the father swallows prejudice and remarries a Catholic and Samuel begins the process of healing and carrying on with life.

   While his father settles into his second family, Hynes spends a summer on a farm. The city boy discovers new cadences to life, a different pattern to work. Most importantly, Samuel gains a sense of his own past. "For one season I had been one, like my father...and all those other country people in our family." With solemn pride, Hynes announces, "I had been my ancestors." With this knowledge of self, Hynes is better able to comprehend the modernizing influences besetting his altered family in Minneapolis during the 1930s.

   There, he observes his father's deep ambivalence over labor violence. A Shell oil salesman, the father is a rock-ribbed Republican who extols the virtue of independence and responsibility. Yet, the father "despised the upper-class ways" of the elite. Samuel watches his father's despair increase. "Whoever won this war, something he believed in would lose. It was sad, losing like that, and I felt his sadness."

   Tempering Samuel's growing awareness of the world is his evolving relationship with his step-mother. Hynes respects, admires and even likes her -- her purposeful energy, her zeal for order, her enthusiasm for life and work -- but never loves her. Even his thirteen-year-old autobiography excludes mention of her, and when his father coerces Samuel to include her, Samuel does so with a "chilled heart." Frugal and despeate to keep her family afloat, his step-mother sells a forgotten but cherished model train set. Awash in the economic misery of the Great Depression, where even wanting something unneeded is considered unworthy, the sale reminds the still-growing Samuel of the transitory nature of life, that "anything could be taken."

   Yet, "The Growing Seasons" is far from grim. Warmth abounds in the memoir, ranging from an excused absence from school due to a housekeeper's inability to close her mouth to the supreme satisfaction to Hynes' deep satisfaction at being able to finally don long pants to school instead of the dreaded knickers. The evolution to adulthood, the absoption of what it means to be a man, the quiet knowledge of the necessity of standing alone -- these benchmarks of maturation -- bespeak a person truly in touch with his own personality and his own potential.

   As Hynes becomes a man, with his attendant alienation from public school and his fascination with sex, he carries with him the formative experiences of childhood. Chafing at his relative youth, longing to experience the formative fires of war, Hynes' restlessness symbolizes an American energy, a robust transformative power that rings true in this instructive and engaging memoir.




4. One of the keys to this charming book is how many BAD things Sam and his friends do, that prove to be so interesting to read about! His style is understated, self-effacing. Flat, almost, but in a good way, all the cards on the table. I spent four years in Iowa and at the time someone told me that the adjective for Midwesterners wasn't "innocent" or anything like that, but "uncomplicated." You're used to seeing everything around you, all the way to the horizon. So maybe you lack a layer of artifice.

   I'll illustrate. His mother dies when Sam is a young boy, and his father (a stern but wonderfully forgiving fellow) remarries. Sam never figures out what to call his stepmother, so he avoids the issue completely. Permanently! This is remarkable. My wife had the same problem vis-à-vis my parents. It was kind of comical and kind of embarrassing on all fronts, but she figured it out a few days into our first extended visit with them. Sam never manages, yet seems to think nothing of it. Apart from remarking on the fact, he just goes on with things. Some readers may find this lack of navel-gazing a flaw, but I kind of liked it. It's more neutral, one might say scientific, and draws you in to the story. You can interpret things for yourself. He may answer that question of mine in his other books, or he may not, but with his winning style I know it will be fine reading right through it and around it.

   Another example comes near the end, pages 241-242, springtime of Sam's senior year in high school, World War Two looming, when he ponders the nature of women, and convertible automobiles, and describes how a guy a year or two older reveals to him and his friends an important secret about women, and sex. I read this long passage to my wife, and Hynes's wonderful deadpan style had us convulsing in laughter.

   Hynes is my parents' generation (and J.D. Salinger's), so I read it through that prism. My father and I grew up in suburban New York, my mother in El Paso (but I think maybe this is a guys' book), whereas Hynes is from Minneapolis (with a memorable summer on a farm). But it all connects. The eternal summertime of youth.




5. This is a prequel to the author's great war memoir, Flights of Passage, which I read with much appreciation 23 May 2001. If you have not read that book, by all means read this one first, then read it. This book is an account of a not extraordinary boyhood, but it is told in a poignant, if a bit mocking, way. When I finished it, I found myself much impressed by the way he told the story. It maybe helped that Hynes is only a few years older than I am, and that his account of a single summer doing farm work in Minnesota was filled with things I remember from my youth on an Iowa farm. It was another world and a time now irretrievably past, and I think this is an elegantly told growing up story I enjoyed as much as I did Russell Baker's memorable classic (Growing Up, read 11 Apr 1986) and Jimmy Carter's An Hour Before Daylight (read 11 Mar 2001).

5 comments about Tarzan, My Father.

1. I've loved and admired the great Johnny Weissmuller since I was a tiny tot. The Weissmuller Tarzans were a major component of my childhood and had a profound impact on my development; Tarzan's jungle ethics and code of "right triumphs over wrong, good over evil" have always made more sense to me than today's gray-area mish-mosh and the Tarzan series, 50 years later in my case, is still tops for entertainment value. Given my near-fatuousness (which has actually caused jealousy in some of my male colleagues), I'm delighted to have discovered so much recent material that acquaints fans with the man behind the loincloth.
   The author of this contribution, due to his mother's vitriol, wasn't allowed contact with his father after his parents separated, and was only permitted to pick up the pieces as a young adult. On that basis, he explains that his purpose in writing this book is to introduce readers to the man he came to know, as well as to correct misconceptions and errors that have appeared in previous biographies. He succeeds in spades on both counts and we learn that Johnny was a kind, (too) trusting, uncomplicated man who, unfortunately, endured much sadness in his life, much of it due to his refusal to believe that others aren't always what they seem. Johnny Jr. provides a very even-handed account of his father's life from his perspective, and we learn a lot about him and the other Weissmuller children as well.
   Contrary to some naysayers, this is a very nicely written account; there are a few errors (some of them real bloopers) that should have been caught by fact-checkers while it was in the galleys (identifying Laurel and Hardy as each other comes to mind), otherwise it's stylistically very sound.
   Readers are also treated to a bit of Hollywood dishing; I don't think I can look at Red Skelton in quite the same ever again! And we learn that Esther Williams greatly exaggerated events associated with their introduction and subsequent relationship. Fun stuff, and it's also gratifying to learn that Johnny Jr. and his wife found so much happiness with each other. Sadly, I only recently learned that he died of cancer in 2006. My heartfelt condolences to his survivors.
   I've always regretted that I was unable to meet my hero and this book confirms what I've always known in my heart: that he was a great guy. Bottom line, read David Fury's mostly excellent biography and chase it with this one to correct misinformation Mr. Fury was fed by the last Mrs. Weissmuller, Sr., Maria.
   (Woo hoo PATRIK LEMBERG (and baby bro?)--another review to vote on! How EXCITING! Is "smelly" (your description) Kenneth part of the voting block?)



2. In the thirties and forties there was something big film wise to look forward to nearly every year, bigger than the anticipation of the next Star Wars, Bond or Potter film. It was Tarzan and most of those years there was only one Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller. To many today he is still the only Tarzan.
   
   Tarzan fans in our generation actually embraced a parallel universe in the jungle man's world. There was the long time favorite given us by author Edgar Rice Burroughs, an articulate educated Lord Greystoke who could stow away his tux, put on a loin cloth to lead Tantor and his herd of elephants. Then there was the bigger than life Johnny Weissmuller on the screen who portrayed a Tarzan of few words, gave a battle cry that is more familiar today than most any other sound byte and whose biggest vocabulary word was "Umgawa!" Whether we were first introduced to the book Tarzan or film Tarzan, we could love both. Weissmuller himself was familiar with the concern Burroughs had about the portrayal that first MGM and then RKO required and wished also that he could have a bigger speaking role. However, the money was good and he couldn't object too much. When Burroughs himself made Tarzan films and hand picked Bill Brix with his well spoken vocabulary the films bombed.
   
   In "Tarzan My Father" the author Johnny Weissmuller, Jr. gives a portrayal unlike others in the past. It is not an apology or a "daddy dearest". Johnny Jr. loved his father and admits there were both good and bad things that can be related. However, even in the bad, Johnny Weissmuller is more the innocent taken in by business managers, partying big name friends and two of his five wives, especially the last one who did all she could to trash his name and memorial while making money off of interviews. There is also a rebuttal against Esther Williams's recent book with interviews that reveal she has lied about Johnny Weissmuller as she did other legendary Hollywood heroes.
   
   Johnny Jr. covers the myths behind the legend and uses documentation when needed. When stories conflict he gives both sides as would a true historian. I found myself looking at older books I have on the father and find that in general the son has been forthright in his handling of events. There is also detailed information about his father's sports career which makes him also legendary in that world as well. I had an opportunity to meet Johnny Weismuller briefly in the Roanoke Valley of Virginia and the man I saw was the man described by his son. It was a moment I will always remember. He was both generous and kind.
   
   The book covers the father's friends and cronies, people like Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Red Skelton and others who are icons today. In his own case the author knew well Robert Mitchum, Ricky Nelson, Burt Reynolds and Elvis. There are great pictures in the book that will delight any and all film fans.
   
   Yes, the book is very personal and unlike some, the author does it not to exploit his name but to give honor to one of the great film heroes of the 20th century. The book itself is endorsed by Danton Burroughs, secretary of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. This is a tribute and it shows us a man bigger than life who greatly influenced more than one generation.
   
   Johnny Weissmuller had what some might call a simplistic philosophy that his son paraphrases as "A man should stand where God places him-jungle trails or Hollywood streets-and fight for those things he believes."



3. Excellent book, told me more about the man than i ever knew. my own father is a johnny fan of his era, a swimmer too. I grew up to know the legend of what he was. After reading the book he is more of a man then i could of imagined. What a great read.



4. I have gone about 1/3 of the way through this book and have been very disappointed. The events are told unevenly and there is little insight to this potentially great story or stories behind the man. I thought I would get greater insight from his son but so far very little is revealed. The writing is very choppy and I am surprised that the professional writers helping JR couldn't write more fluently. It is like they took all the notes and forgot how to put them into words. the book is extremely short and is more like a magazine article. There seemed to be so much waiting to be told. Amazon should send half my money back because all I got was half a story.



5. It was a very fascinating read and gave a great insight to the life of Johnny Weissmuller and how the studios treated stars then.
   I would recommend it to anybody that liked the Tarzan movies.
   
   A Great Read

1 comments about Longest Road to America: Volume 1: Childhood.

1. While reading this book I felt like I was right there with the author emotionally and phisically. The way she brings her emotions on paper is magical. You can feel her pain, you can dream her dreams, but you can not predict what is coming on the next page as a real life is unpredictable, and this is an author's real life story. And also her ability to describe the way of life back then is so realistic and educational. I can not wait to read the next volume as this one ended in such an unexpected way - what happens next?

4 comments about While the Locust Slept (Native Voices).

1. This is a chilling, true-life account of a childhood that should have never been, and 17 years of life that would forever haunt the author, Peter Razor. Peter, an intelligent boy that was raised in an orphanage as a ward of the state, then placed in an abusive indentured farm home had a childhood that is reprehensible, and sadly true. Supposedly protected by the state, Peter became a boy who flinched from physical contact, and had no understanding of what a normal happy home should be like. Unlike Peter Razor, not all children were lucky enough to survive the abuse that could be found in state orphanages when Peter was growing up. Corporal punishment went unchecked, and Peter, an American Indian, also had the added disadvantage of prejudice thrown in. Eventually placed on a farm, his placement was not carefully monitored, and the abusive treatment with this family was never noted by the social worker who was suppose to be monitoring Peter's placement. While the Locust Slept, a Minnesota Book Award Winner, is a compelling, well written tale that reads like a novel, yet is sadly a true tale of a horrific childhood that was unchecked by the state that was suppose to be protecting him



2. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Razor while on a trip to Cochiti Lake, New Mexico. After talking for a while he passed me a copy of his book and asked me to read it and then share it with others. I read the book cover-to-cover on the trip home and was amazed that the man I had talked to had once been the little boy in the book. Mr. Razor was a kind and gentle man that never revealed the scars from his childhood in any part of our conversations. America's inhumane treatment of the Indian people is well documented. This book offers graphic descriptions of individual cruelty that was fueled by ignorance and prejudice. I don't know if many human beings could have endured this sort of trauma and survived to be so kind. Peter is a truly incredible person and I would recommend his book to anyone.



3. Like Peter I lived and went through total hell from a matron while I was in the same orphanage. After reading Peters book while the locust slept,I relived the same anger, as Peter indured.This book should be a must read by anyone,who plans on going into the socialwork field and know that this is truly a non fiction tragedy which happened.This is a story that took place a long time ago,but could still and does happen today.



4. My father as well was in the Owatonna "orphanage" which he termed as an "intournment camp/prison"! Babies and children were treated more tragically at this place than you could even imagine. Babies died for lack of "touch" and nurturing! Children were beaten, mauled, and oftentimes died as a result of such treatment. Peter Razor cites an insightfully true story of just SOME of the horific experiences of babies and children in this most insightful book on our country's past (AND EVEN PRESENT) ways of "Social Services" treating our "lost" children!! A MUST TO READ!

2 comments about Anne Frank: REFLECTIONS ON HER LIFE AND LEGACY.

1. In this book the editors have selected thirty-one excerpts from various writings about Anne Frank and collected them together under four basic ideas: Anne's life, Anne as a writer, Anne on stage & screen and Anne in relationship to the Holocaust. Overall the selection of the writings is very good. They are of high quality and of varying points of view, particularly with reference to the last three sections of the book.
   
   For example, there is considerable difference of opinion to Anne's ability as a writer, some find her skills exceptional while others think her ability overrated despite her impact. Better known are the arguments over whether the play and movie produced from Anne's diary truly reflected the "real" Anne. Then there are the arguments, growing in recent years, as to whether Anne's diary is an "accurate" or "important" portrayal of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust. I may not agree with Lawrence L. Langer's assessment that the diary is not a "vital text" of the Holocaust but seeing his point of view allows me to think a little deeper about my own position. And therein lies the book's real strength.
   
   Ultimately, though the excerpts are brief and it's easy to plow through them rather quickly, this book can open one's eyes. Some of the material I had read before in other places but I was very glad to encounter the wide points of view that the editors were able to gather. The fact that Anne's single work still has the power to generate such scholarship 60 years later seems to point out its continuing importance in our experience.



2. As part of my effort to learn my role as the dentist in the 1955 version of the play at the local junior college, I read some 14 or 15 books by and about Anne Frank and this one capped my study quite nicely. I recommend it as the one to read after "The Definitive Edition" (or the fascinating "Critical Edition", if you're up to that), Willy Lindwer's "The Last Seven Months", Melissa Muller's "Anne Frank: The Biography", Miep Gies' "Anne Frank Remembered", and Eva Schloss' "Eva's Story". It's scholarly, well edited and footnoted, and has a fine bibliography.

5 comments about Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family.

1. I usually do not put aside a book before finishing it. In this case, I got about a third of the way through and just skimmed the rest and could not bring myself to read it in detail. I purchased this book hoping (despite prior reviews) that it was more food lit than self analysis. However, the strength of this book is in its description of tense family relationships, and indeed not in its descriptions of food in Desalvo's life. If you are interested in it anyway, good luck - there is a lot of emotion in it.



2. This book is the first in a very long time I've read word by word. Even when I could set aside her subjects, the vitality of DeSalvo's writing style was irresistable for me--elegant, layered, a bit vulgar, self-indulgent, complex, musical, heartbreaking, self-effacing, beautiful.
   My maternal grandparents were Italian immigrants to California; my mother and her sisters born in the U.S. DeSalvo's exploration of the Italian culture both here in the States and in the Old County gave me a handhold among my mother's family as no other source has.
   You'll either hate this book immediately, like tripe, or inhale it like the best cannoli.



3. OMG....I forced myself to get beyond page 13 and just had to give it up. There really isn't any 'food'in her repetitive writing, but a lot of angst squished up into a white bread samich that apparently NO one wants to eat, each for their own screwed up, twisted reasons.... what this book did for my stomach was put it in knots..... BASTA!
   This book makes me happy I am Sicilian NOT "Italian-American".



4. I enjoyed this book from start to finish. The descriptions of food were mouthwatering. I appreciated the view into the lives of Italian immigrants and their lives in Italy. The family interactions were well described. Each chapter was a gem of an essay. Unlike many memoire writers, this author sustained the high level of writing and self-exploration to the very end. I really admire her ability to dig into her real feelings and to try to understand her parents and grandparents. I plan to look for other books by this author.



5. I picked up this book to read thinking it was like so many other books I have read about Italian-Americans in an attempt to better understand my husband's family---a light-hearted look at the "crazy" antics of a close knit, pasta eating bunch of eccentrics. However, this is not at all what this book is, and what it actually is helped me more than any book I've read in understanding the family I have joined.

   When Desalvo says "Crazy in the Kitchen", she is not kidding. Her mother and much of her family really does have seriously crazy tendencies---fury, cruelty, irrational financial habits, long running feuds, etc. And the kitchen is where many of these things are played out---from her mother's poor cooking to her step-grandmother's good but steep in unbreakable traditions cooking, to the cooking and eating of her ancestors in Southern Italy, or the NOT eating---for I finally understood what drove so many Italians to come to America. I had no idea how awful conditions were for the peasants of Italy. What they were subjected to honestly reminded me of accounts of places like Cambodia or China, during the Great Leap Forward.

   I learned a great deal about Southern Italian culture from this book, and found myself reading many passages to my husband, a first generation Italian-American who spent much of his youth in Sicily visiting, and who had parents who spoke only Italian, and even he was stunned to find out much of what I read. I now understand my late in-laws much better than I did before this reading.

   The writing style of this book took a bit to get used to, until I let myself fall into it. It's written like so many stories told by my in-laws---in a bit of a circular way---you find out a bit here, and a bit there, and it all adds up in the end.

   I want to thank Ms. Desalvo for this book. I look forward eagerly to reading the rest of her works.

5 comments about Slackjaw.

1. This memoir is funny,clever and engaging. Knipfel is an interesting guy to say the least. If "Slackjaw" hadn't come highly recomended to me, there's no way I would have read a book about a mentally-ill, guy who tried to kill himself several times before going blind. However, since I did, it was rewarding, humorous, proud and never depressing.



2. The book is most interesting. Knipfel knows how to tell a story; he tells in a sarcastic way the story of his life. Very important book for rehabilitation teachers for the blind and social workers.



3. Jim Knipfel is an idiot, truly. He's the type of person that delivers stories on characters like Werner Herzog and Ed Gein, very self-aggrandising, and, most significant to his idiot status, fails to understand anything at all. Want to be like Jim Knipfel? Quickly read a story in the newspaper, spend the next ten years watching The Nanny, then write a story based on what you read in the newspaper, and then assume the role of expert on the whole thing.



4. I like this book. I like Jim Knipfel's writing in general. He's quite good, and seems to be a naturally gifted author who's learned the ropes from his years as a columnist. In a strange sort of way, I consider him to be yet another link in the line of writers first described in the 1950s as the Beats. He measures up to many of those great truthsayers, and I always look forward to more work from Mr. Knipfel.

   Long may he linger.




5. Slackjaw is an entertaining memoir about the author's past. Jim writes with raw honesty and the book has a contagious personal quality that makes it hard to stop reading. Even though people may go through different hardships than the author, he writes in a way in which all people can relate. Through all the hard times, Jim takes the time to look at the ironic, hilarious details that make life, life.
   This book is highly recommended...

5 comments about A Boy Called H: A Childhood in Wartime Japan (Kan Yamaguchi Series).

1. "A Boy Called H" may just be fiction based on author Senoh's life, but it carries a revealing look at what was going on in Japan during WWII. It is an engaging story of an adventurous, curious and intelligent young boy doing his best to survive, and it is much more enjoyable to read than a dry scholarly publication. It is best read knowingly, understanding that there are truths within the fiction - truths that I would venture many people are unaware of. Even today it is important for all of us to understand how a government can take its people into a war that they never voted for and persuade them to believe it is for a just cause.



2. I warrant the quality of Hitoshi Noguchi,MD's Review. It is also good summary of the criticisms in Japan.



3. I am very sorry to rain on the parade, but this book, a one time best seller in Japan, was almost immediately proven to be a forgery. A young boy comments on Japanese wartime policy and deplomatic decisions that were not known to the public at the time. The events were taken out of an almanac in chronological order and fictionalised without any consideration as to when the Japanese public learned about it or what information they had at the time to base their opinions on. In reality, a boy like H could not have existed simply because he could not have known, and consequently could not have felt, the things he did. This is a beautified account by a leftist who would like to believe - and would like the reader to believe - that he had been a pacifist from the very begining.



4. you should still read this book. John Bester did a fantastic job of preserving the nuances of the original story and translating the Japanese into easily-readable English.

   The story is of H, the son of a tailor of Western-style suits and his bible-thumping, God-loving wife. Right away you know, that this isn't the story of an ordinary 1940's Japanese family. The author weaves some marvelous threads in creating this story so that we see the many sides of H. We find a character who is aloof but entirely likeable. The reader can immediately relate to his individuality. This story is not meant to be an historical account of the atrocities of war. It is merely an exploration into the life of a young boy during an extremely difficult time. Enjoy it for what it is. The author speaks very kindly of the Americans and the anecdotes are hilarious.

   The quality of the storytelling is so good, that you forget that this is the debut novel of a 65 year old man who paints screens plays. The book reads as if a ten-year old H is standing there reading it aloud next to you. Senoh has an amazing memory to be able to recall all of the anecdotes.

   I hope other foreign residents of Japan enjoy this as much as I did.




5. I enjoyed this book so much that after reading a public library copy I ordered a copy for my personal library. (Although the book is self-described as autobiographical fiction, the library had it housed in the biography section.) The 50 chapters are very short, perfect for pre-bedtime reading, and the writing is simply enough that I would imagine that many young teens could enjoy it as well. H is not always a likeable character - he can be obnoxious and quite selfish at times. But he is also bright, perceptive, and frequently winds up doing the right thing in spite of himself.

   Written from the viewpoint of a young boy growing up in wartime Japan, criticism that the book doesn't address the atrocities committed by the Japanese military throughout Asia doesn't make much sense as the Japanese government hid these events (as well as its military defeats and appalling casualty rates) from its people even more than it tried to hide them from the world. The book is obviously critical of the leadership that persisted in pursuing a war that could have resulted in the virtual annihilation of the Japanese people and amazingly forgiving of an enemy that intentionally killed, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians through strafings, fire-bombings and, of course, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

   "A Boy Called H" is an entertaining companion piece to Kiyoshi Kiyosawa's "A Diary of Darkness" and Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook's "Japan At War: An Oral History." (I would also recommend Yukio Mishima's classic "Confessions of a Mask" - a superb novel about a schoolage boy in wartime Japan.) Books like these help us to remember to put a human face on our enemies, past and present. When we bomb civilian centers we are not killing a faceless entity called "the enemy" - we are killing men, women and children, most of whom are just going about their daily lives trying to survive.