Of some interest to students of gun aficionados and those interested in the Vietnam War as it was fought on the ground.
A by-the-numbers account of a Marine sniper’s years in combat during the Vietnam War.
With 103 confirmed kills, Chuck Mahwinney is “the US Marine Corps’ deadliest sniper.” Raised in rural Oregon and used to hunting rabbits and deer, he scored at the top of his boot camp class. Early on in his account of Mahwinney’s training, Lindsay telegraphs his main point: “Little did Chuck know that the rifle he held in his hands was a copy of the rifle he would use to outscore all marine snipers before and after that moment.” Mahwinney was thoroughly trained as a sniper before landing in Vietnam, where he was made a machine gunner, a thankless and statistically dangerous specialty. Finally talking himself into posts as a spotter and then a sniper, he did three tours, “averaging six kills a week” by the end of the first. Lindsay describes Mahwinney’s landing for home leave in San Francisco and being accosted by flower children calling him a “baby killer,” a trope that has no documented basis in fact (it comes from the Rambo film franchise). More believably, Mahwinney figures in a number of unpleasant but realistic combat scenes that end poorly for the people at the receiving end of his Remington: “A hole appeared in the man’s forehead as bloody brain matter burst from the back of his skull.” After rotating back to the civilian world, Mahwinney struggled with PTSD and self-medication while working as a forest ranger, his fame catching up to him via commerce, with a branded knife and special-edition rifle. Though it deals with a different war and a different era, Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead is a superior look inside the mind of a Marine sniper.
Of some interest to students of gun aficionados and those interested in the Vietnam War as it was fought on the ground.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781250282422
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.
The bestselling author recalls her childhood and her family’s wartime experiences.
Readers of Winspear’s popular Maisie Dobbs mystery series appreciate the London investigator’s canny resourcefulness and underlying humanity as she solves her many cases. Yet Dobbs had to overcome plenty of hardships in her ascent from her working-class roots. Part of the appeal of Winspear’s Dobbs series are the descriptions of London and the English countryside, featuring vividly drawn particulars that feel like they were written with firsthand knowledge of that era. In her first book of nonfiction, the author sheds light on the inspiration for Dobbs and her stories as she reflects on her upbringing during the 1950s and ’60s. She focuses much attention on her parents’ lives and their struggles supporting a family, as they chose to live far removed from their London pasts. “My parents left the bombsites and memories of wartime London for an openness they found in the country and on the land,” writes Winspear. As she recounts, each of her parents often had to work multiple jobs, which inspired the author’s own initiative, a trait she would apply to the Dobbs character. Her parents recalled grueling wartime experiences as well as stories of the severe battlefield injuries that left her grandfather shell-shocked. “My mother’s history,” she writes, “became my history—probably because I was young when she began telling me….Looking back, her stories—of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing—were probably too graphic for a child. But I liked listening to them.” Winspear also draws distinctive portraits of postwar England, altogether different from the U.S., where she has since settled, and her unsettling struggles within the rigid British class system.
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64129-269-6
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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