A little more of the before and after of their war experiences might have enriched the context, but Bolger ably conveys how...
A crisp account of a messy war, focusing on two Nebraska brothers, one of whom would later become a senator and Secretary of Defense.
Chuck Hagel supported the Vietnam War even before he enlisted, and his younger brother Tom had his reservations, which turned into outright opposition from his battle-scarred experiences. Yet the two fought beside each other even as the war deepened into an unwinnable quagmire. Bolger (Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, 2014, etc.), who won five Bronze Stars during his Army career, brings a unique perspective to the story, as he understands the intricacies of modern warfare and also acknowledges the wide gap between those who fight these wars and those who lead them. He maintains a tight, precise focus on the military campaigns in Vietnam while providing context from back home as anti-war efforts intensified. From the start, Chuck was a natural leader, excelling at whatever he attempted, and he fit well within the military culture—as did Tom, at least at the start, though he wasn’t quite the overachiever his brother was. Despite plenty of combat action, both thankfully returned home; Chuck was discharged first, and he embarked on a career as a radio broadcaster before going into politics. Tom saw his reservations deepen as he attempted but couldn’t quite numb himself with alcohol and marijuana, with too much time to think after his transfer from the battle lines. After he followed his brother home to Nebraska, an argument about the war resulted in a fistfight, one that alarmed the neighbors into calling the police. They resolved never to discuss it again, as Chuck became a conservative Republican legislator and Tom a more liberal lawyer and professor of law.
A little more of the before and after of their war experiences might have enriched the context, but Bolger ably conveys how Vietnam felt to those who fought it and what it meant.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-306-90326-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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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