A stirringly personal account of the horrors of war.
A veteran blends history and autobiography in this debut memoir examining his military service during the Vietnam War.
Taylor grew up in Alabama and South Carolina as a “World War II baby,” born in the 1940s during a time when the United States became a central actor on the world stage. Nevertheless, he wasn’t particularly obsessed with geopolitics, and the growing unrest in Vietnam barely registered for him as he went to college; married his high school sweetheart, Linda; and found a rewarding job as a forester for a paper company. But the American involvement in Vietnam certainly grabbed his attention when in 1965, just before his 23rd birthday, he received a notice from the local draft board summoning him for a physical examination to assess his fitness for military service. He couldn’t discover a palatable way to avoid the inevitable draft notice and so decided to volunteer. After some training, he found himself sent to Vietnam as an infantryman; combat was “the only job for which I had been trained.” The author describes, in riveting, unflinching terms, the grim reality of war and a soldier’s confrontation with death. He was wounded by a land mine explosion, an injury that earned him both a Purple Heart and the right to return to the United States. Taylor’s remembrance is linearly organized, and he candidly discusses his childhood and adolescence, including his puberty years marked by a “strong sexual appetite but very little sexual knowledge.” His account also eclectically braids the political and the personal, looking back at his life through the lens of world history—at one point, he compares the “prepubescent periods” he shared with South Vietnam. While he intelligently reflects on the U.S.’s foreign policy failures and its misplaced obsession with the march of Communism, his most trenchant and moving reflections are subjective. At one point, Taylor recounts the impact of hearing a soldier proselytize: “Avoiding the truth that I might die in Vietnam, I always thought I would make it home all in one piece and on this side of the dirt. Our ‘street preacher’ unnerved the troops by reminding them they might not live to see another day.”
A stirringly personal account of the horrors of war.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73265-390-0
Page Count: 238
Publisher: FE Taylor Group, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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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