A Vietnam memoir with zero punches pulled, related by one of the most incisive observers of the American political scene.
Acclaimed political cartoonist Danziger looks back at his year in Vietnam, somehow managing to convey difficult truths without completely depressing readers.
Drafted shortly after graduating college in 1968, Danziger believed (as many did) that the war was in its final stages. He reported to Fort Dix hoping the worst would be over before he could be sent overseas. He offers detailed, often amusing accounts of the ill-focused basic training, which was “phenomenally stupid, left over from World War II and ha[d] nothing to do with conditions in Southeast Asia. It was this side of mad.” Seeking ways to further delay deployment, he entered language school to learn Vietnamese, assuming he would then be stationed far from combat zones, interpreting intercepted signals from the field. But the instruction was perfunctory at best, and after acceptance to officer training—another ploy to postpone deployment—Danziger was sent for ordnance training, and his language skills eroded quickly. Then he was deployed to Vietnam, where he was one of many junior officers with inadequate training and no enthusiasm for the missions. The author’s account of his year “in-country” is consistently candid about the futility of the war, and he makes little effort to portray his own role as anything but ineffectual. The book’s title plays on the Vietnamese’s attempts to pronounce his name. Looking back, as if trying to explain the era to a younger audience, he tries to provide perspective. Subsequent history shows that America learned nothing from Vietnam, he writes; the country has entered one unwinnable war after another, with few moments of success and thousands of lives lost. Unsettling as these truths may be, Danziger’s compelling presentation of his experience makes the book a must-read war memoir. The author aptly opens his trenchant book with an epigraph from Joseph Heller.
A Vietnam memoir with zero punches pulled, related by one of the most incisive observers of the American political scene.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-58642-273-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1174
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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