Gracefully transports readers on an odyssey that transcends the exotic locale and legacies of war to focus on the power of...
An intimate travel memoir tracing one veteran’s journey from war to reconciliation.
This moving debut, co-authored by a retired career Army officer and his wife, reveals how a trip to confront the ghosts of his Vietnam War experience led to affinity for Vietnamese culture, a humanitarian commitment, annual three-month stays, and deep friendships with many Vietnamese, including former enemies. Logan and Head take turns narrating self-contained vignettes that advance the larger story in an effective contrapuntal style. Logan served two tours, first as a lieutenant in the thick of combat, then as a captain at a beachfront hotel headquarters. His accounts of battles, brotherhood, brothels, bureaucracy and postwar brooding set a fitting opening tone. Head, a retired corporate trainer with a big heart, gentle spirit, and Buddhist leanings, grew up in Canada and married Logan after both were divorced with grown children. She contributes a more dispassionate view of the war as well as helpful insights about her husband. “Vietnam, A Country Not a War,” her introduction to Part 2, epitomizes the book’s message. They share keen observations about the places they’ve been and introspective feelings about the people they meet. Scenes are colorful, chaotic, and full of contrasts, reflecting Vietnam itself—a communist country lacking social services, full of bustling cities with utility outages, agrarian culture facing bulldozers, and tin-roof huts with satellite dishes. Vestiges of war—rusted fuselages, elders missing limbs, and children with Agent Orange–related birth defects—are everywhere; so is hospitality. Logan and Head began as outsiders smuggling toothbrushes and personal care donations. They grew into part-time residents, distributing portable school libraries and providing managerial support for a startup that employs the disabled. In the process, the couple running that enterprise essentially adopted them as family. Historical context helps reshape wartime caricatures as the authors write with a sense of immediacy and attention to detail that fully invoke the moment and setting for each encounter.
Gracefully transports readers on an odyssey that transcends the exotic locale and legacies of war to focus on the power of human connection.Pub Date: April 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9917623-0-9
Page Count: 341
Publisher: JOTH Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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