Hawks will not admire the sometimes self-pitying tone of Todd’s narrative nor the choice that underlies his memoir, but...
A deserter’s rueful memoir of hard roads traveled.
Born and raised in rural Nebraska, Todd was no ordinary war resister; in the mid-1960s he had volunteered for officer training in the Marines, fully expecting to see combat, but had washed out owing to a pair of bad knees. Having done what he thought was his duty, he took a job as a crime reporter for the Miami Herald, found a beautiful girlfriend, and set about making his mark on journalism. Life had other plans, however, and Todd was drafted into the army and sent to a processing post near Seattle. At the urging of a boyhood friend who returned from Vietnam shattered by the experience of war, he skipped across the border to Canada, where he was greeted with both anti-Yankee hostility and open arms. Broke, he spent time on Vancouver’s Skid Row, where he fell in with fellow deserters who sat out the war under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Most of them returned (voluntarily or otherwise) to the US to face punishment, but Todd renounced his citizenship and found himself on a very short list—numbering only 13 individuals—of deserters reckoned to be men without a country. Granted landed immigrant status by a sympathetic bureaucrat, Todd eventually found work as a reporter in Vancouver. He discovered only later that he had been slated to go not to Vietnam but to Germany (where, a fellow soldier wrote to him, “You’d be sitting on your ass . . . writing press releases for Colonel Jerkoff”). In retrospect, he concludes, he would not have fled the military and his country, although he now ranks as one of Canada’s leading journalists and has made an apparently good life for himself across the line.
Hawks will not admire the sometimes self-pitying tone of Todd’s narrative nor the choice that underlies his memoir, but readers with an interest in the Vietnam era will find a fresh voice in his story.Pub Date: April 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-09155-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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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