A compulsively readable book for anyone who lived through the Vietnam era—or who wants an idea of what it was like.
A former GI recalls his tour of duty in Vietnam, and it’s not quite the story readers may expect.
Ulander was drafted after dropping out of college in 1969. At 19, he was already self-aware enough to recognize and resist the indoctrination of basic training. Once in Vietnam, he found a different war from the one his training prepared him for. Marijuana was ubiquitous, though the officers and other “lifers” opposed it on principle. Most of the field soldiers he met wore peace signs on their helmets, smoked vast quantities of dope, and listened regularly to the latest rock music from “the World” back home. It became evident that the real enemies weren’t the North Vietnamese soldiers but his own officers, most of whom put career advancement first and the lives of their men a distant second. Luckily, Ulander found mentors in more seasoned soldiers who took him under their wings because the better he was at staying alive, the safer everyone would be. Readers follow him on his early missions, where he learned how to turn off his thoughts and just take in what the jungle was telling him. While he did endure combat—luckily, he came through unscathed—the book is really about the camaraderie and the philosophical detachment he adopted as a survival tactic. Ulander has a knack for capturing the scenes he experienced and for expressing the draftees’ dislike of the lifers. The characters are identified only by nicknames, possibly to shield them even after the passage of decades, possibly because some are composites. In the dedication, the author notes that there are parts of the story he leaves untold, and most readers will have an idea what some of those are. One thing is unambiguous: the author came out of the war with a fierce hatred of the military and the social forces that made Vietnam possible.
A compulsively readable book for anyone who lived through the Vietnam era—or who wants an idea of what it was like.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62317-012-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: North Atlantic
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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
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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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