An informative, potentially controversial introduction to the war in Vietnam.
A Vietnam veteran reflects on his experience in this book that’s part memoir and part historical analysis.
The Vietnam War continues to be a hotly disputed subject generations after its conclusion, and it’s often used as a model of military and foreign policy failure. Mastran (Privateer!: Building a Business Reforming Government, 2012), however, proffers a nuanced interpretation that avoids triumphalist revisionism and serves as a thoughtful corrective to the regnant view of U.S. involvement in Vietnam as an intractable quagmire. He divides his book into three sections; the first is devoted to his time as a cadet at West Point, the second to a concise synopsis of Vietnam’s history as a nation, and the third to his service as an officer in the U.S. Air Force during the war. The author, following in his father’s footsteps, encountered austere discipline while at West Point that prepared him to weather the chaos of war in an unfamiliar land. While he was a cadet, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, making it a near-inevitability that he would be sent overseas. He was then sent to Stanford University to get a master’s degree in operations research, and he ultimately worked for the directorate of special weapons in Vietnam. Mastran was part of a special team that worked on “anti-infiltration” technology designed to stop enemy movements in South Vietnam by providing necessary intelligence for bombing raids. He also worked on developing computer-based war-game simulations. Over the course of the book, Mastran weaves his own personal reflections into a wider narrative fabric that includes an account of the United States’ entanglement in Southeast Asia and the Cold War as well as of the partisan politics that dominated discussion of the war on the domestic front. He also furnishes a provocative view of the infamous Tet Offensive as a major military victory and laments what he considers to be the American media’s unfair coverage of the war. Mastran’s analysis is notably restrained and temperate, given his personal involvement, and manages to seamlessly combine a moving remembrance with acute geopolitical insight. Some of his most affecting conclusions reach beyond both arenas into something grander and more philosophical: “I also confirmed that humor could carry me—and others—through any kind of misery, whether at West Point, in Vietnam, or anywhere else.”
An informative, potentially controversial introduction to the war in Vietnam.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5078-0576-3
Page Count: 284
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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