A powerful compilation of poems on the continuing costs of a 50-year-old conflict.
A Vietnam veteran’s poetic reflections on the war.
Berger, a professor emeritus at the University of Alabama, has written multiple books on public relations and leadership. In this volume, he provides readers with 34 original poems based on his experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Decades after the conflict ended, he notes, many vets remain psychologically “trapped.” Berger’s own “living fragments” of memory continue to haunt him a half century later, he says, “each a small piece of an unfinished mosaic in a gallery in my mind.” Writing poetry helped him stitch together these fragments, and ultimately helped him to “come home” mentally, long after he’d returned physically. The collection opens with a poem detailing Berger’s work as a “Next-of-Kin” editor in the Army, where he wrote hundreds of letters informing families of their loved ones’ deaths. Here, in his characteristically unfiltered style, Berger describes his own inadequacies writing “golden glorifications” of the sacrifices made by lost soldiers, whose families he knows will soon be trapped in “the straitjacket of emotional grief.” Overall, the works here are raw and often poignant. Although many poems reflect the author’s own psychological state (such as “Five Seasons for Soldiers,” in which memories of the war “loop endlessly” and “time runs forward, back”), others evoke other perspectives. “Orange Rain,” for instance, tells the story of the American and Vietnamese lives destroyed by Agent Orange, whose toxicity was “a shared secret” between the military and the corporate “chemical boys,” while another disturbing poem, “Girl Selling Her Fruit,” tells of a pubescent Vietnamese girl selling fruit, and sex, to American soldiers, suggesting that her “performance today…ensures a tomorrow.” The verses are accompanied by 24 pieces of original art submitted by members of the Providence Art Club in Rhode Island; they range from oil paintings to collages to digital illustrations. With varying degrees of effectiveness, and despite a few amateurish misses, the art effectively reflects the main themes of Berger’s poetry: the brutality of war and its psychological tolls, as well as the fragility of human life.
A powerful compilation of poems on the continuing costs of a 50-year-old conflict.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9855048-1-6
Page Count: 92
Publisher: WordWorthyPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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