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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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