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 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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