by Donald Luther Krimes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2015
Devotion, narcotics smuggling, and traveling amid the war-torn Southeast Asia of the 1960s and ’70s dispassionately...
Debut author Krimes describes how a tour of duty in Vietnam brought him both love and a side career making runs to Indochina for shipments of handcrafts—and heroin.
The title suggests an agonized confessional like Born on the Fourth of July. But this memoir might comfortably fit in the true-crime genre. Eschewing a political point of view on the Vietnam War, Krimes recounts serving in Danang in 1968. A naïve rural kid with an aptitude for things mechanical, Krimes worked in his unit’s motor pool. He explored South Vietnam’s nightlife and black market. Krimes fell in love with Lan, a bar girl, or “girlson,” and vowed to marry her after his service and repatriation. He kept his word, returning in the early 1970s to find Lan—although she was in an arranged marriage to an abusive Vietnamese man (Krimes priced out possibly having the inconvenient husband killed). Lan left her husband for Krimes, and to make a post-military living with his new bride, Krimes turned to selling the plentiful heroin (“skag” in Army slang) by concealing drugs inside luxury audio-electronics systems he took through customs to the U.S. Ultimately, Krimes and his wife moved to Pennsylvania. Via a connection in Thailand, Krimes continued smuggling after the fall of Saigon, broadening to legit commerce in Asian handcrafts and products. While Krimes warns repeatedly of the dangers of carrying large wads of cash around Bangkok, when bloodletting happened, it was from a rogue monkey attack. And, while beautiful girlsons repeatedly tried to tempt him, he remains devoted to Lan. He actually grew transfixed by his wife’s native Buddhist culture, even as she was shedding it for America’s melting-pot society and church. One wishes Krimes spent more time exploring these religious shifts on emotional and philosophical levels. As it is, even deaths of some of his heroin customers and friends come as stoic notations, without much comment. The just-the-facts approach—minus expected resentment over Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Tet, Agent Orange, Jane Fonda, and PTSD—fulfills the back-cover promise of an exotic life on the edge “lived with no regrets.”
Devotion, narcotics smuggling, and traveling amid the war-torn Southeast Asia of the 1960s and ’70s dispassionately recounted.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4809-1313-4
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
Awards & Accolades
Likes
21
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
National Book Award Winner
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.