Novelist and short-story writer Barnes (English/College of Southern Nevada; Minimal Damage: Stories of Veterans, 2007, etc.) offers a moving memoir of his time at war in Vietnam.
As a young man in 1963, the author was adrift, doing OK in college but without real purpose, emerging from a troubled childhood that left him confused and insecure. A letter from his Draft Board and subsequent enlistment in the Army quickly changed all that. He became, perhaps much to his own surprise, a member of the elite Green Berets, and soon enough found himself in Vietnam. Stationed at Tra Bong, a remote Army outpost surrounded on three sides by forested mountains, Barnes’ life was at first boring and routine, and he captures expertly the humdrum nature of war: beer and bad coffee, rats and diarrhea, darts and cards, heat and insects, dumb officers and flawed but brave comrades. Then, on a routine patrol gone wrong, four of his own and a large number of Vietnamese and Montagnard tribesmen were killed. As he lifted a buddy’s decomposed body off the ground, both a hatred for the enemy and the stupidity of the war emerged. He began his own patrols and learned he could do what few Americans in his outfit could: aptly climb the treacherous mountains and survive in the unforgiving jungle as well as the natives. He learned to trust the jungle, and despite the heat and leeches and danger that seemed omnipresent, he felt more alive than he had before or since. Nearly 50 years later, Barnes writes that “Vietnam is the only thing in my life that isn’t fiction.” In the grand scheme of things, not much happened at Tra Bong; “the life of a trooper out here meant little, except to those who were out here.” But with sharp and unsentimental prose, Barnes makes it matter a great deal. A war remembrance of beauty and unadorned brutality.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3448-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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