As raw as an open wound and as truthful as it is terrible.
A Marine maimed in a war he had ceased to believe in comes home to a divided country indifferent to his sacrifice in this memoir that looks back with rancor.
Gaylord, the son of an Irish mother and an Indian father, grew up in grim poverty in southern Indiana in mid-20th-century America amid conditions reminiscent of backwoods life a century earlier. A good pair of shoes was beyond reckoning. He and his eight siblings too often went hungry. Home was a shack by the Ohio River or wherever his itinerant parents could afford the rent. Writing in a spare style befitting this stark beginning, Gaylord builds to a parade-ground ceremony in 1967 when, as a newly minted Marine, he was filled, for a bright shining moment, with deep pride in himself and his country. Not long after, he was deployed to Vietnam. There, he endured a haywire existence of search-and-destroy missions in the stifling jungle hunting an enemy rarely seen but skilled in deadly ambush. In progressively more profane language matching his growing aversion toward what he saw as a political war not worth dying in, Gaylord writes bitterly of longing to desert—though readers will doubt he ever would have—until June 1968, when he was severely wounded in an attack and lost both feet. After treatment at a succession of hospitals and facilities, some good and some bad, he was unceremoniously dumped back home and left to hobble painfully on ill-fitting prosthetics. At 19, he felt his life was ruined with nothing to show for it but a monthly pittance of government compensation. In rage and despair, he took to drink, came close to suicide, and at his nadir (here Gaylord seems to rush to a surprising and quick conclusion), he turned to prayer and gained redemption. Gaylord’s blunt honesty is beyond reproach, as is his effort to bring the awful plight of the disabled veteran before his readers. Even his liberal use of profanity seems fitting for this harsh tale.
As raw as an open wound and as truthful as it is terrible.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2002
ISBN: 978-1403327352
Page Count: 160
Publisher: 1st Book Library
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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