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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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