Nelson neatly pulls together the story of two lives, representatives of their generation, to build something more durable...
Haunted by a continued sense of loss and guilt, a former Marine Corps Captain investigates the death of his childhood friend in Vietnam.
As teenagers living in Lubbock, Texas in the 1960s, David and Lee Roy knew that their road to an education would be through the military. In this poignant debut memoir, Nelson looks at how the friends’ two paths diverged, and he examines his own attempt to find spiritual affirmation. Caught up in concerns about his life and career advancement, Nelson began to drift away from Lee Roy, and decided to seek Marine Corps backing for a law degree to qualify for a JAG assignment. Lee Roy opted to serve in the infantry, graduated and went through a year at the army's Monterey Language Institute, learning Vietnamese. He received his papers to go to Vietnam in November 1968. By the end of February 1969, he was dead, killed in the course of Operation Dewey Canyon; he was 23. Nelson didn't attend the funeral, telling himself that he couldn't spare the time from law school. A chance encounter with one of Lee Roy’s comrades in Lubbock in 1997 put Nelson on the trail of reconstructing his friend’s story. In 2001, Nelson established the Lee Roy Herron Scholarship Fund in Texas Tech's Vietnam Center. The scholarship program helps Texas Tech students study in Vietnam.
Nelson neatly pulls together the story of two lives, representatives of their generation, to build something more durable and more valuable than personal memories alone.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-89672-694-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Texas Tech Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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