An epic, solidly reported memoir even if it tends to keep the more polarizing elements out of the picture.
Debut author Bowen recounts experiences as a U.S. Marine photographer and journalist, followed up by memorable communications stints with the Voice of America and the American Legion.
Subtitled “The Story of a Marine Corps Combat Correspondent,” Bowen’s illustrated memoir covers his experiences in and out of Vietnam. A prolific contributor of photographs and articles to military news outlets, Bowen has a polished, easy, just-the-facts style that makes for accommodating reading for both veterans and civilians. Son of a Linotype operator in Virginia, Bowen started early as a newspaper stringer but learned that without a college degree, he’d never evolve beyond freelancing. The Marines, which he joined in 1960, offered far greater opportunities, and Bowen shot pictures and told stories of corps life for a number of communications outlets, including the storied Leatherneck magazine. Often based in Okinawa, Japan (he also enrolled in and helped shape a prominent military-photojournalism–education project at Syracuse University), Bowen had a correspondent’s access not only to the span of the Vietnam War, but also to NASA (especially Skylab), the Jonestown cult massacre in Guyana, and the hostage crisis in Iran. The author is clearly proud of his Marine (and, by extension, American) heritage, yet he still keeps the lens cap tight over his own politics and emotions regarding some of the most bitter episodes in modern U.S. history. In his exacting prose, one senses Bowen setting his Marine officer/gentleman discipline aside only occasionally, when he vents frustration as an “overqualified” job-seeker in the 1980s when young novices rose above the proven, accomplished vet (fortunately someone at Voice of America got Bowen his next major gig, and he was back doing communications on behalf of Uncle Sam). The final quarter showcases Bowen’s photography—images that portray American soldiers (especially in the Vietnam theater) without losing sight of their humanity. If the writer seems to be holding back a bit on his feelings, these photos speak volumes for him.
An epic, solidly reported memoir even if it tends to keep the more polarizing elements out of the picture.Pub Date: March 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-2013-1
Page Count: 412
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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
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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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