Inconclusive but discomfiting—and sure to excite controversy.
Bob Kerrey: war hero, then war dissenter. War criminal as well?
Vistica, a CBS News producer, broke the story of then–Navy SEAL Kerrey’s 1969 raid on the Vietnamese hamlet of Thanh Phong, which resulted in the deaths of at least 21 unarmed women and children. Kerrey, who afterward lost a leg in combat, maintained that the civilians, in the confusion of the raid, had wandered into crossfire; this, at least, is his qualified recollection in his recent memoir, When I Was a Young Man (p. 546). Qualified, indeed, for Kerrey has publicly professed not to remember much of the incident, of a piece with his reputation on Capitol Hill, where he served as senator from Nebraska, as someone whose powers of recall were not to be trusted; “Kerrey’s struggle with the demons of memory,” Vistica writes, “made it difficult for him to trust and quick to withhold.” Some of the men under his command remember the night differently; they maintain that Kerrey ordered that civilians be fired on. Such an act would not have been out of keeping with what is known of SEAL operations, Vistica offers; secret agents as much as sailors, quick to assassinate political targets under cover of night, the SEALS were something of a law unto themselves, and Kerrey himself once remarked, “I tried to kill [the enemy] according to the general rules, which were not as specific as they should have been. We were given a hell of a lot more latitude than we should have been.” Whether Kerrey, now president of the New School, truly was responsible for committing mass murder remains an open question, though Vistica’s evidence and Kerrey’s strange attempts to explain it away are powerfully suggestive. Vistica urges that the question be settled and standards for acceptable military behavior either enforced or revised, if only because “our military model, especially in dealing with terrorism, is going to be closer to the SEAL method of operation than the conventional-forces model”—and because we have been so quick to decry barbaric acts in places such as Bosnia while shielding our own wrongdoers from scrutiny.
Inconclusive but discomfiting—and sure to excite controversy.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28547-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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