An accomplished biography of an almost forgotten, but important, player in American Vietnam War policymaking in the mid- and late 1950s. A handful of Americans, most of them intelligence operatives, were present at the creation of the Republic of (South) Vietnam in 1954. One of them was Dr. Thomas A. Dooley, the until-then unremarkable son of a prominent St. Louis family. Dooley went to North Vietnam in 1954 as a US Navy doctor to administer to refugees who wished to flee south before the Communist takeover. The next year the self-promoting, flamboyant physician became ``the symbol of Vietnamese-American friendship in the ongoing struggle to promote the first democracy in Southeast Asia,'' notes Fisher (Humanities/St. Louis Univ.) in this myth-breaking biography. Fisher presents a deeply researched and highly critical study of a man who in the late 1950s was ``America's first celebrity-saint'' by virtue of his seemingly selfless medical work in Vietnam and Laos and his loudly professed Roman Catholic beliefs. However, according to Fisher's convincing work, Dooley actually was an abrasive, arrogant, self-aggrandizing egotist who was also ``naive to the point of self-delusion.'' It appears that he did truly care about helping destitute Vietnamese and Lao citizens. But Dooley, who died of cancer in 1961, allowed himself to be used shamelessly by the CIA and by the so-called Vietnam Lobby to put an idealistic face on the growing American involvement in Vietnam. One of the ``lives'' Fisher's subtitle refers to was Dooley's secret homosexual persona. Dooley's homosexuality shadowed every facet of his life in the homophobic era in which he lived, especially after it led to his embarrassing dismissal from the Navy. Fisher's examination of that part of Dooley's life is, like the rest of the book, insightful and enlightening. (33 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55849-067-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
