An exciting, personal retelling of time in Vietnam, though a narrative imbalance distracts from reflections on the true...
In his memoir, Estes revisits his time in Vietnam and attempts to convey the brutality of war and its effect on young men.
As an 18-year-old with a pregnant girlfriend and few options, Estes decided to enlist in the Marines after high school. The year was 1968, but he says, “When joining I didn’t really think much about Vietnam.” Despite his naïveté, he then had to contend with a ferocious drill sergeant, the impending doom of battles in a country he knew nothing about and his longing for home. He befriended P.J., a crass jokester who claimed to be “a good looker, a lover, a fighter, [and] a wild bull rider.” Together, they went from boot camp to the jungles of Vietnam, from which Estes provides a firsthand account of his experiences with bloody battles that seem pulled from Full Metal Jacket (1987) or Platoon (1986). His attention to the small details of everyday life during war is impressive, and the dialogue he recreates feels authentic and authoritative. However, the narration is a bit uneven. An older, wiser voice often interjects, undercutting the bombastic, vulgar exchanges and halting their momentum. The second half of the memoir, during and after the Tet Offensive of 1969, expands into less familiar territory. Estes writes of his time with soldiers who never entered into the fight, his working alongside Vietnamese citizens and the difficulty of returning home. He packs an enormous amount of horror and violence into short, rough sentences. “We weren’t shocked. We weren’t sad. We were tired,” he says of soldiers in a devastating battle. It’s in this mode of honest, straightforward reporting that his first-person vantage point finds its most affecting moments.
An exciting, personal retelling of time in Vietnam, though a narrative imbalance distracts from reflections on the true effects of war.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1484869901
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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