The result is on a par with Michael Herr’s Dispatches as literature—but, unlike Herr’s book, scrupulously true, making it a...
An extraordinary grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War, by a former CBS News correspondent.
Line troops and combat reporters, writes Laurence, are a superstitious lot. As an “edge against the fear,” he himself wore the same set of threadbare fatigues each time out, didn’t polish his boots, and carried “coins, charms, four-leaf clovers, religious medals and all kinds of talismans”—everything, in short, but a weapon, the lack of which, he hoped, would keep him from being killed. He may have been on to something, for, while covering the 1968 siege of Hue (where he encountered the shell-shocked kitten, the cat of the title, that figures in so much of the narrative), Laurence wandered into the sights of a North Vietnamese army soldier who could easily have shot him dead but, inexplicably, did not. He had many other brushes with death covering military operations up and down Vietnam from 1965 to 1970, but he’s careful to keep his focus on the soldiers, civilians, and other participants less willing than he to be caught up in the fire. That focus is close, and it yields affecting views; of a group of young field marines, for instance, he writes, “War seemed to make them more humane, more gentle, at least with each other, as if everybody involved in this violent undertaking was trying to behave his best, not knowing what might be coming next.” Among the many high points here is a long section describing the author’s time with a star-crossed infantry unit during the invasion of Cambodia, a tour that yielded the documentary The World of Charlie Company. Though many of its threads eventually come together, Laurence’s narrative reads less as a coherent story than as a loose, slightly hallucinatory string of anecdotes, which, considering the circumstances, seems altogether appropriate.
The result is on a par with Michael Herr’s Dispatches as literature—but, unlike Herr’s book, scrupulously true, making it a standout in a crowded field.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-891620-31-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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