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 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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