Most readers will want to turn to more deeply felt books about the era, including Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977),...
Middling memoir of the bad old days of booze, acid and shrapnel.
Call me Snakebrain. So poet Anderson (Creative Writing/Univ. of Connecticut Greater Hartford) dubs the “second self that lies dormant until he’s needed” that somehow hitched a ride on his psyche while serving in Vietnam. He arrived there in 1967 and served as a Marine medic in combat “against the tough and committed Communist Vietcong and NVA.” Before the war, he writes, he did all the usual things of the early ’60s—pondering inequality and injustice, signing up for college, flunking ROTC, hanging out with young radicals in coffeehouses and listening to folk singers. During the war, he dodged mortar shells and bullets, smoked dope and listened to Hendrix—the stuff, in other words, of countless memoirs and nearly every Vietnam movie ever filmed. Anderson writes competently if formulaically—“I don’t know anything either, apart from the masks I use to cover my fear”—but there’s not a surprising moment at any turn in the narrative. Even the closing, when he returns with other writer veterans to workshop with the erstwhile enemy, is predictable down to the last note (“So much of my life is a blur. The war years are veiled in fear and confusion”). The author’s rigorously honest account of his postwar return to college life and the development of various addictions as manifestations of trauma—“Pot loosens the flak jacket and I float where I don’t want to”—will be of use to students of psychology, counselors and other mental-health professionals. Those readers have their hands full treating veterans of latter-day conflicts, but Snakebrain makes for an oddly fascinating subject.
Most readers will want to turn to more deeply felt books about the era, including Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977), Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam (1994) and Peter Coyote’s Sleeping Where I Fall (1998).Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06855-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
