Warm, witty recollections well-aware of their absurdity.
Absurdity and drama go hand in hand in Baysden’s witty, loopy memoir of his time as a Navy adviser during the Vietnam War.
This slim volume tells of the shenanigans Baysden and several of his colleagues got up to while he was serving as a U.S. Navy lieutenant. Over the course of a year starting in 1968, Baysden was a senior adviser to the Vietnamese in the Mekong Delta, based in and around Rach Gia (usually mispronounced as “rock jaw,” ergo the book’s title). For various reasons, Baysden’s posting was given a fair amount of resources and very little “adult supervision,” as Baysden puts it. On top of that, the advisers, including the author, were only on duty for five days out of every 10, allowing the misbehavior to reach impressive levels. Long-running poker games, frequent trips to every brothel (aka “ladies clubs”) within traveling distance, gambling on which traps would catch giant rats and in which order: these are only some of the events Baysden describes with good humor and plentiful wit. That’s not to say the horrors of war didn’t occasionally intrude, but those horrors—which Baysden describes with respect and sensitivity, even in cases of wild coincidence or absurdity—were not commonplace in his experience, a fact for which Baysden is profoundly and profusely grateful. Literature about the Vietnam conflict is replete with grim, powerful stories of hardship and loss, so Baysden’s memoir is immediately striking for the light, joyful attitude in its pages, without ignoring the realities on the ground. If there is a downside to the stories here, it’s that they are rather disjointed, presented seemingly in the order the author remembered them, with characters mentioned before they’re introduced and given context. Baysden is well-aware of this, however, outrightly stating it as an issue within the first few pages, so readers are at least forewarned. Still, fans of often hilarious literature that explores the ridiculous nature of war—including Catch-22, which Baysden explicitly references—will feel right at home.
Warm, witty recollections well-aware of their absurdity.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4834-3418-6
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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