Devotion, narcotics smuggling, and traveling amid the war-torn Southeast Asia of the 1960s and ’70s dispassionately...
Debut author Krimes describes how a tour of duty in Vietnam brought him both love and a side career making runs to Indochina for shipments of handcrafts—and heroin.
The title suggests an agonized confessional like Born on the Fourth of July. But this memoir might comfortably fit in the true-crime genre. Eschewing a political point of view on the Vietnam War, Krimes recounts serving in Danang in 1968. A naïve rural kid with an aptitude for things mechanical, Krimes worked in his unit’s motor pool. He explored South Vietnam’s nightlife and black market. Krimes fell in love with Lan, a bar girl, or “girlson,” and vowed to marry her after his service and repatriation. He kept his word, returning in the early 1970s to find Lan—although she was in an arranged marriage to an abusive Vietnamese man (Krimes priced out possibly having the inconvenient husband killed). Lan left her husband for Krimes, and to make a post-military living with his new bride, Krimes turned to selling the plentiful heroin (“skag” in Army slang) by concealing drugs inside luxury audio-electronics systems he took through customs to the U.S. Ultimately, Krimes and his wife moved to Pennsylvania. Via a connection in Thailand, Krimes continued smuggling after the fall of Saigon, broadening to legit commerce in Asian handcrafts and products. While Krimes warns repeatedly of the dangers of carrying large wads of cash around Bangkok, when bloodletting happened, it was from a rogue monkey attack. And, while beautiful girlsons repeatedly tried to tempt him, he remains devoted to Lan. He actually grew transfixed by his wife’s native Buddhist culture, even as she was shedding it for America’s melting-pot society and church. One wishes Krimes spent more time exploring these religious shifts on emotional and philosophical levels. As it is, even deaths of some of his heroin customers and friends come as stoic notations, without much comment. The just-the-facts approach—minus expected resentment over Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Tet, Agent Orange, Jane Fonda, and PTSD—fulfills the back-cover promise of an exotic life on the edge “lived with no regrets.”
Devotion, narcotics smuggling, and traveling amid the war-torn Southeast Asia of the 1960s and ’70s dispassionately recounted.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4809-1313-4
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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