A worthy contribution to the literature of the Vietnam War.
A draft resister of yore recounts the tumultuous days of the Vietnam War.
“We were the last American generation,” writes Greenbaum, “in which lives and careers were interrupted and placed on hold, redirected, overturned, damaged, or even ended” due to the “whims” of government officials committed to winning a war. Today military service is voluntary, but until 1973, it was luck of the draw. From 1960 to 1973, by the government statisticians’ reckoning, nearly 2.5 million American men joined the military, about three-quarters of them draftees. There were also some 209,000 draft resisters—evaders, runaways, all lumped into the category “draft dodgers,” with another 100,000 deserters added into the mix—of whom only a very small number were ever prosecuted. Greenbaum looked up old friends and queried strangers alike to present stories, many of which were only reluctantly shared. Indeed, as one doctor began to speak, his wife urged him to be silent, fearful to this day that “some nut will be at our door trying to hurt us.” Some stories emphasize the inarguable fact that the war was fought by minorities and the poor, two groups that lacked the student deferments and sometimes-questionable medical exemptions. Most successful conscientious objectors were white, while the most famous of them, Muhammad Ali, was “a significant example of the legal machinations, religious and racial prejudice, and Selective Service bumbling that sincere conscientious objectors had to endure.” Many resisters left the country, never to return, and found that authorities abroad, from French detectives to Canadian customs officials, were sympathetic to their cause. In the end, Greenbaum notes, while it took courage to fight, it also took courage to “say no to the Vietnam War machine, to a government and its systems that were geared to use you.”
A worthy contribution to the literature of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: March 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780700636303
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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