Flags of Our Fathers
by James Bradley, Ron Powers
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Book Summary Information
Author: James Bradley, Ron PowersEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-08-29
ISBN: 0553384155
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Bantam
Book Reviews of Flags of Our Fathers
Book Review: Great Book!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought that this book was amazing. Even though it was a little slow at the beginning and the end, it still held my attention with all of the stories about the 6 flag raisers of Iwo Jima. This book takes place in the Pacific, where the U.S is fighting the Japanese in the climax of the Pacific World War II. The book starts out in the birthplaces of all of the flag raisers, John Bradley of Appleton, Wisconsin, Franklin Sousley of Hilltop, Kentucky, Harlon Block of the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, Ira Hayes of the Gila River Indian Reservation, Arizona, Rene Gagnon of Manchester, New Hampshire, and Mike Strank of Franklin Borough, Pennsylvania. John Bradley was born in 1923 in a town called Antigo, where he would be born, be raised, where he would return with his own wife and children, and where he would die. He became a Navy Corpsman, in the hope to escape land battle, but he ended up being a corpsman in the Marines. He always was trying to do the best he could for others and to serve the community. Franklin Sousley was born in 1925, and became the only son when his 5-year-old brother died of appendicitis. Franklin grew up shielded by his mother, who was always looking after him and holding him close by her. He became a Marine in 1944, and spoke of his "duty as a man" to fight in a war, and it was said he wasn't afraid of anything. Harlon Block was a Seventh Day Adventist, who grew up to be taught, "Thou Shalt Not Kill". He was born in 1924, and played on his high school football team, leading them to an undefeated season. He was a tough person, and never really seemed to get hurt. Ira Hayes was extremely quiet. He never seemed to be very social. He was born in 1923, and born a Pima Indian. In their culture, it was encouraged to be quiet, and to not seek recognition, which is exactly what he did all of his life. He became a Marine nine months after Pearl Harbor. Rene Gagnon was born in 1925. He also was a quiet person, always in the background, like in The Photograph. He was shy and unaggressive. He enlisted in the Marines in 1943, much to the disappointment of his mother. Mike Strank was called "A Marine's Marine", because of the fact that he was always helping somebody else. He was born in 1919, in Czechoslovakia, he moved to the U.S 1920. His ambition was to become President. He joined the Marines of his own free will in 1939. He was the only one of the six flag raisers to enlist by his own will and not be drafted. At the beginning of this book, James Bradley, whose father was John Bradley, describes all of the characters personalities. He then goes on to describe the battle of Iwo Jima, from the black sands of the beach to the chilly winds on top of Mount Suribachi. He describes the never before seen horror that the boys faced while fighting an almost invisible Japanese enemy. Afterwards, he describes the stories that followed the flag raising, and what happened after Iwo Jima. The six flag raisers have two main conflicts, and they are both internal and external. Inside them, they have to watch all of their good buddies get killed and slaughtered as the days wear on, have to watch the horrors of the glorified war, finally realizing that it is not that fun. They have to cope with the emotional stress of being constantly shot at, and the gore of the dead. They also have to deal with the external conflict on how to survive, and how to complete their objectives. An exerpt that explains what James Bradley had to go through on Iwo Jima and one of his conflicts was "But the corpsman saw only the results. His entire mission on Iwo was to hop from blown face to severed arm, doing what he could under heavy fire to minimize the damage, stanch the flow, ease the agony.
The corpsmen remembered. And their memories ruled the night." This shows a little bit of the stress that the Marines had to go through on Iwo. It scarred them for the rest of their lives. I think that no person under 13 years of age should read this book because it is very graphic and it is sometimes hard to understand. I could not compare this to another book because this is sort of a documentary novel, and I have never read anything like it because it is so good.
Summary of Flags of Our Fathers
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERTHE TRUE STORY BEHIND THE IMMORTAL PHOTOGRAPH THAT HAS COME TO SYMBOLIZE THE COURAGE AND INDOMITABLE WILL OF AMERICA
In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima?and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island?s highest peak. And after climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag.
Now the son of one of the flagraisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came together in a moment that will live forever.
To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. But after his death at age seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company. Following these men?s paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific?s most crucial island?an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and 22,000 fanatic defenders who would fight to the last man.
But perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what happened after the victory. The men in the photo?three were killed during the battle?were proclaimed heroes and flown home, to become reluctant symbols. For two of them, the adulation was shattering. Only James Bradley?s father truly survived, displaying no copy of the famous photograph in his home, telling his son only: ?The real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn?t come back.?
Few books ever have captured the complexity and furor of war and its aftermath as well as Flags of Our Fathers. A penetrating, epic look at a generation at war, this is history told with keen insight, enormous honesty, and the passion of a son paying homage to his father. It is the story of the difference between truth and myth, the meaning of being a hero, and the essence of the human experience of war.
The Battle of Iwo Jima, fought in the winter of 1945 on a rocky island south of Japan, brought a ferocious slice of hell to earth: in a month's time, more than 22,000 Japanese soldiers would die defending a patch of ground a third the size of Manhattan, while nearly 26,000 Americans fell taking it from them. The battle was a turning point in the war in the Pacific, and it produced one of World War II's enduring images: a photograph of six soldiers raising an American flag on the flank of Mount Suribachi, the island's commanding high point.
One of those young Americans was John Bradley, a Navy corpsman who a few days before had braved enemy mortar and machine-gun fire to administer first aid to a wounded Marine and then drag him to safety. For this act of heroism Bradley would receive the Navy Cross, an award second only to the Medal of Honor.
Bradley, who died in 1994, never mentioned his feat to his family. Only after his death did Bradley's son James begin to piece together the facts of his father's heroism, which was but one of countless acts of sacrifice made by the young men who fought at Iwo Jima. Flags of Our Fathers recounts the sometimes tragic life stories of the six men who raised the flag that February day--one an Arizona Indian who would die following an alcohol-soaked brawl, another a Kentucky hillbilly, still another a Pennsylvania steel-mill worker--and who became reluctant heroes in the bargain. A strongly felt and well-written entry in a spate of recent books on World War II, Flags gives a you-are-there depiction of that conflict's horrible arenas--and a moving homage to the men whom fate brought there. --Gregory McNamee
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