An often valuable primary account of the Vietnam War from a self-described “attitude-challenged” author.
A debut memoir about a soldier’s stint in the U.S. Air Force from 1965 to ’69.
Randers, a Vietnam veteran from Minnesota, takes a melancholic tack while recounting the time he spent stateside at the end of the tumultuous ’60s—a tone that recalls Tim O’Brien’s work in the 1990 short story collection The Things They Carried. Randers never encountered the carnage of combat (“I was lucky, no more can be said”), but death still seemed just around the corner throughout his enlistment. The pages are filled with adventures that emerged from this existential pressure, generally calling to mind accounts by his mentioned literary forebears—John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, and, especially, Jack Kerouac. However, Randers’ prose, with some exceptions, has fewer distinguishing lyrical or rhythmic features than those authors’; when it drags, it feels as if one is reading a hastily composed diary. Its plain style is sometimes clear and fresh, though, with occasional moments of crystalline retrospection: “We were trapped in a changing world between our civilian belief and our military commitment, and that nasty little war in Southeast Asia.” Overall, the book offers an account of military work and life but also focuses on a group of young people and the art they consumed, the drugs they took, the love they made, the cars they owned, the travel they managed, the music they heard, the books they read, the theater they witnessed, and the food they ate—as in a delightfully sensual description of a meal hunted, cooked, and enjoyed in the rugged Alaskan backcountry: “…and voilá! Fresh duck and vegetables perfectly done. It was scrumptious, especially in that pristine wilderness, and how entrancing that aroma was, freshly cooked duck co-mingled with the sweet smell of the tundra by the rushing, clear, cold waters of the Yukon River.” Included at the conclusion of each section is a “Songs of the times” list followed by an epigraph postscript—an intriguing structural quirk.
An often valuable primary account of the Vietnam War from a self-described “attitude-challenged” author.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68201-099-0
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Polaris Publications
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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