Heavy on the technical details but rich with vividly recalled episodes of aerial warfare.
A thorough memoir of a flight surgeon’s adrenaline-filled experiences in the Vietnam War.
Debut author Clark describes himself as a man with a great “thirst for knowledge” and “passions for high adventure,” characteristics that led him to pursue medicine and become a flight surgeon for the United States Air Force. During the Vietnam War, he was stationed at Cam Ranh Bay in 1966 and “experienced more adventure than most men experience in ten lifetimes.” As a flight surgeon, in addition to his regular medical duties on base, he flew more than 90 missions in a Phantom F4-C, which strafed, bombed, and napalmed targets. Clark details these missions, such as destroying way stations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail over Laos: “The scenarios of anti-aircraft artillery reaching skyward to destroy us with red and white fingers of liquid-lead and explosives were typical and characteristic of every mission.” He shares his informed perspective on the political circumstances of the time, including some of the major flaws of administration as well as the destitute conditions of the Vietnamese and the spirit of both camaraderie and occasional tension among Air Force personnel. Clark eloquently recounts tending to pilots’ injuries and handling the aftereffects of disastrous crashes. He writes intelligently, illuminating events and the insights they evoked. Long stretches of dry, technical descriptions, however, may overwhelm readers (e.g., his 10-page introduction to the history and capabilities of the Phantom F4-C). This isn’t a fast-paced memoir; instead, it’s more of an excavation of the many particulars of military life and is interspersed with thrilling adventure in the skies of Vietnam.
Heavy on the technical details but rich with vividly recalled episodes of aerial warfare.Pub Date: May 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9965639-3-2
Page Count: 628
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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