A unique perspective on the Vietnam War, though no less depressing than the old one.
Admiring biography of two officers in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), which fought far better than most American histories have acknowledged.
Vietnam has a long martial tradition, writes military historian Wiest (Haig: The Evolution of a Commander, 2005, etc.), so there was no shortage of young men eager for a military career when ARVN was created in the 1950s. They fought for 25 years and suffered more than 200,000 casualties, laboring under two critical flaws. Vietnamese leaders wanted a lightly armed, mobile anti-insurgency force, but American military advisors insisted on a heavily armed, Western-style army dependent on the United States for equipment and logistics. In addition, Vietnamese rulers relied on the army to remain in power, so they chose senior officers for loyalty rather than competence. Despite this, good commanders existed, and some ARVN units fought well. Wiest tells the story of two officers, Pham Van Dinh and Tran Ngoc Hue, who led their units with courage and energy well documented in reports from American advisors who worked with them. Hue was captured during the disastrous invasion of Laos in 1970 and spent 13 years in North Vietnamese prisons. Dinh switched sides during the equally disastrous 1972 Easter Offensive and served in the North Vietnamese Army until his retirement. The author spends a great deal of time describing the fighting. While several hundred pages on small-unit actions will interest only military buffs, they present the war from the unfamiliar point of view of the Vietnamese. For example, ARVN did much of the fighting in the epic 1968 battle for the Citadel of Hue City, but saw Vietnamese contributions downplayed by American journalists more interested in depicting heroic Marines. The later offensives make painful reading as lack of good generalship and absence of American firepower undid the efforts of many brave Vietnamese soldiers.
A unique perspective on the Vietnam War, though no less depressing than the old one.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8147-9410-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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