A gripping memoir combined with an uneven legal and political analysis.
A writer recounts his objection to West Point academy rules that violated his religious freedom and explores the evolving nature of the American Dream.
Debut author Vaught grew up in the Bible Belt on a small farm in a family enthralled by the example of his father, Harry, who weathered the Depression’s terrible deprivations and served bravely in World War II. Thanks to his Baptist upbringing—his father was a deacon—Vaught was shown how genuine religious devotion and a healthy tolerance for the divergent beliefs of others could be reconciled. Much to the chagrin of the author’s own mother, Harry supported John F. Kennedy for president despite rampant anti–Roman Catholic sentiments among American Protestants. Meanwhile, Vaught fell in love with the adventure of aviation—he earned a private flying license by age 17—and matriculated to West Point in 1965. But he wasn’t prepared for the academy’s emphasis on relentless competition, draconian rules, and a “total and confining existence.” He found it to be a “pernicious environment,” and finally took a stand against West Point’s compulsory chapel service attendance and forced religious donations, demands he believed infringed on his constitutional rights. In soaring language, he explains his principal complaints: “This was not the American Dream. It was coercion and abuse of power. It stepped back toward the unification of church and state that existed for centuries in Europe. It ignored the breakthroughs toward religious freedom achieved in the American Revolution. It corrupted the ideals that made us free.” The author recollects his intransigent pursuit of the issue, including testifying in court twice, and the “pure retaliation” he suffered in the Army as a result. Vaught’s intriguing memoir is a wide-ranging one that includes a meditation on the value of an authentic religious pluralism, the tension between his spiritual beliefs and the grim reality of war, and the fluctuating meaning of the American Dream. At the heart of that dream, the author contends, is a religious freedom that seems to form the basis for independent thought itself: “Full religious freedom, not just religious tolerance, leads to freedom of thought, as well as the acceptance of the different religions or ideas of others. It implies listening, self-reliance and the freedom to think, along with freedom from the hierarchy of the aristocracy and their organized official religion.” This isn’t the first instance in the book wherein he likens the upper echelons of the military to an aristocracy. In another place, he compares the military brass more specifically to the “aristocracy of medieval Europe,” a peculiar exaggeration that raises questions about the author’s knowledge of the history of aristocracies. In addition, readers should not expect a rigorous legal analysis of the First Amendment. But Vaught still furnishes a rich and compelling account of his own radicalization from a “farm boy wanting to fly airplanes” to a “dissenting political actor.”
A gripping memoir combined with an uneven legal and political analysis.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72832-664-1
Page Count: 236
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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