Freely was born in 1926 in Brooklyn and spent his childhood there and in Ireland, where he moved in response to dire economic conditions during the Depression. Upon returning to America, he left school and enlisted in the U.S. Navy at 17. After the war he resumed his education, earned a PhD in physics, and taught primarily at the University of Bosphorus in Istanbul for more than 50 years. His revealing and often moving memoir covers his childhood and adolescence and ends with his demobilization at the conclusion of WWII in 1945. Freely describes with remarkable insight and affection his youth in both America and western Ireland, where his family generally survived on the edge of destitution. In the navy, he served the last two years of the war in the China-Burma theater, and his account of the combat there is often chilling. Though taught to view the Japanese soldiers as objects of hatred in his teens, Freely now brings decades of hindsight and acquired wisdom to his memoir, an excellent account of a youth becoming a man.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2017 Booklist