by David L. Nelson and Randolph B. Schiffer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2011
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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