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Rating: 
Summary: Real people, real history
Review: I read this book in 1997 because of a review of it on National Public Radio. As a 17-year-old freshman, I saw a mesmerizing photograph of Lummus on the wall of the Baylor University administration building in 1947. I may have seen Lummus, without knowing him personally or the other Baylor football players, in 1940 as a kid from the neighborhood playing on the field next to the dormitory.The book inspired me to apply for and secure a Texas historical marker for Jack Lummus in his home town of Ennis, Texas, in 1999. I researched the project for two years and satisfied myself a vindictive, possessive person offered the only objection to Mary Hartman's book. There are Medal of Honor winners whose actions can only be characterized as impulsive -- still heroic, but impulsive, like covering a live grenade to save one's buddies. Harry Truman's citation for Lummus (and my further research) showed Jack Lummus' action exemplified the pinnacle of bravery in the face of great danger. Faced with interlocking fire from pillboxes at the mouth of a bloody canyon, Lummus personally eliminated three of them with grenades, sachel charges and his carbine, twice being knocked down by Japanese grenades, before he stepped on a land mine that mortally wounded him. Hartman's book also tells of Lummus' love affair with her, a 19-year-old girl from Nebraska who met him in California. I have no doubt he would have married her had he survived. Forget TV and the movies long enough to read about a real hero. Get this book.
Rating: 
Summary: A moving portrayal of World War II lives
Review: This is a wonderful little book about real people. It vividly brings back those days of young men sent off to remote islands, and the young women who waited (vainly, in many cases) for their return. Mary Hartman bares her soul in recalling what must be a sad episode in her life, the loss of a possible life-mate. You don't have to be a veteran to appreciate the author's picture of Jack Lummus, sports hero and ill-fated Marine officer. He emerges larger than life in her words, with so much more impact than the references to this Medal of Honor winner in histories of the battle of Iwo Jima, where he fell. Mary Hartman weaves her youthful uncertainty about the future into imagined last hours of her discovered love. It is more than bitter sweet, it is very moving. What was life like in 1945 for a 19-year old girl from Nebraska, working in the overheated war economy of California? How did these young women meet and relate to the thousands of men working there way closer to the Pacific battlefronts? Read "Texas Granite", and you will be provided with valuable insights into this part of the closing 20th Century.
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