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A Mom's Choice Awards Recipient!
ZigZag Pass: Love and War is a recipient of the prestigious Mom's Choice Award. The Mom's Choice Awards honors excellence in family-friendly media, products and services. An esteemed panel of judges includes education, media and other experts as well as parents, children, librarians, performing artists, producers, medical and business professionals, authors, scientists and others. A sampling of the panel members includes: Dr. Twila C. Liggett, ten-time Emmy-winner, professor and founder of PBS's Reading Rainbow; Julie Aigner-Clark, Creator of Baby Einstein and The Safe Side Project; Jodee Blanco, New York Times best-selling Author; LeAnn Thieman, motivational speaker and coauthor of seven Chicken Soup For The Soul books; and Tara Paterson, Certified Parent Coach and founder of the Mom's Choice Awards. Parents and educators look for the Mom's Choice Awards seal in selecting quality materials and products for children and families.
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Anonymous
Posted July 22, 2008
An 18 year old Indiana farm boy enters WW II in early 1944 and soon learns the hard work on the family farm has help prepare him for the rigors of basic training but not for the horrors of war in the Pacific.
Genre: Memoir Title: ZigZag Pass - Love and War, a Memoir Author: Leon Hesser An 18 year old Indiana farm boy enters WW II in early 1944 and soon learns the hard work on the family farm has help prepare him for the rigors of basic training but not for the horrors of war in the Pacific. Hesser begins his memoir with a look back at his life growing up on a farm during the Great Depression and up through the early days of war while in high school. As was often the case for young men facing the uncertainty of war, Hesser met the girl he would eventually marry after the war, meeting her just three months before going off to war. The girl and the dream of marrying her after the war kept Hesser¿s humanity and his hopes for the future alive throughout the war in the letters exchanged by the couple. War brings together a group of men who often have nothing in common This is starkly made obvious as when Hesser writes of basic training and mentions the names of several of the recruits he shared Barracks # 175 at Camp Hood. Mentioning one now famous recruit, Hesser writes, ¿Yes, he was The Hugh Hefner. In many ways, Private Hefner was just one of the boys - peeling potatoes, scrubbing pots and pans, and serving meals.¿ Then it is off to the Pacific where he sees action in the Phillippines and movingly recounts three days of blood shed in what has come to be known as the battle for ZigZag Pass, a main road lined with Japanese hidden by the jungle and attacking from the steep slopes hemming in both sides of the road. This is a great book, easy to read, an opportunity for all to learn history from one who was there, saw it up close and personal, even to seeing first hand the destruction that brought the end to the war in the horrific form of the A-Bomb. Hesser¿s style is straightforward and descriptive without being sensational nor graphically crude. But with this being a story of war on the front, some of the scenes he describes do show the horror as when he writes of a fallen comrade whose body was retrieved several days after being killed, ¿The only way we could accurately identify him was by his dog tag. The odor was strong and we could hardly breathe.¿ Hesser did marry his sweetheart, Florence, after the war and has been married to her ever since. They now live in Florida. Hesser, a semi-retired State Department Foreign Service Officer, is the award-winning author of nonfiction books, including the best-selling biography of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaugh in the book ¿The Man Who Fed the World¿. Highly Recommended. Reviewer: Pete Klein, Allbooks Reviews. Title: ZigZag Pass Author: Leon Hesser Publisher: Bavender House Press ISBN: 978-0-615-1958-1 9780615-198521
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