In the hands of a Junger or Krakauer, this story might have taken more memorable form. Still, Vietnam War completists will...
Sometimes-trudging, sometimes-moving narrative of a combat mission gone terribly wrong and the layers of politics and memory surrounding it.
Roy Benavidez (1935-1998) was the first noncommissioned officer to be awarded a West Point saber and the first enlisted soldier to lend his name to a Navy ship. He was also extraordinarily valiant, knowingly putting himself in harm’s way to save his fellow fighters when their mission took them into a hornet’s nest of North Vietnamese soldiers. Unfortunately for all concerned, their battle took place in supposedly neutral Cambodia, where Americans weren’t supposed to be. As Blehm (Fearless: The Undaunted Courage and Ultimate Sacrifice of Navy SEAL Team SIX Operator Adam Brown, 2012, etc.) divines, it was probably that geographical detail that kept Benavidez from winning a Medal of Honor, something corrected a dozen years after the fact. The author’s long-held fascination with all things Green Beret continues apace here, and his thorough reconstruction of the ill-fated battle is reminiscent of C.D.B. Bryan’s much differently intended exposé Friendly Fire (1976). At spots, the narrative is too portentous and detail-caressing, in the way of civilians when writing of battle: “He flipped a switch, and Roy heard the discord of battle from a little speaker that buzzed with static: the sharp, repeated crack of rifle fire, the muffled impact of explosions, and, most unnerving, the cursing and urgent calls for air support and extraction.” Or, “he was going to fight the red tide of communism before it crossed the oceans and crashed onto the shores of America.” A little goes a long way, especially when a single firefight stretches for pages. Overall, the narrative seems a good magazine article pulled into book length, with some slipshod moments (e.g., one doesn’t get a master’s degree in Shakespeare) and too many draggy stretches.
In the hands of a Junger or Krakauer, this story might have taken more memorable form. Still, Vietnam War completists will be interested.Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3951-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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