An affectingly homespun and gritty account of how US Army Colonel Ben Purcell and his wife Anne coped with his five years (1968-73) as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. Trading off chapters, Ben describes what it's like to have your life taken from you in one stroke of bad luck, while Anne details a sort of widowhood in which she struggles to preserve a tightly woven life in the absence of her beloved partner. The Vietnam-set chapters are gripping, full of drama and telling detail. Knowing he will not get medical aid without cooperating, Purcell spills the beans on US infantry tactics to one ``Pugnose''- -they are based, he says, on man-to-man vs. zone coverage, safety blitzes, end-runs, etc. Pugnose buys Purcell's football-inspired fakery, and the prisoner gets a doctor of sorts. When interrogator ``Crisco'' asks Purcell where the Americans are now that Purcell needs them, a US fighter plane appears from nowhere at treetop level, followed by a deafening sonic boom that terrifies Crisco and ends the interview. Eventually Purcell escapes, but is recaptured, isolated, and forced to subsist on rice and hot water. (The appearance of tea signals further interrogation.) Back home, Anne, who up to now has made all major decisions with her husband, copes with the void as best she can, keeps the car running, and fights the pull of despair, holding her young family (five children) together as much by prayer as by anything. And that is the same glue that binds her husband together: the faith that is the message of this book. At its center is a calm fearlessness that is almost unnerving, even as Purcell's lack of rancor toward his captors is impressive. A powerful, engrossing, well-written documentation of quiet heroism on two fronts. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-07020-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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