Smart and self-aware, Musgrave delivers one of the best recent books on America’s experience in Vietnam.
Outstanding memoir of service as a Marine rifleman and subsequent radicalization.
Musgrave, a poet who appeared in numerous episodes of Ken Burns’ documentary The Vietnam War, couldn’t wait to sign up. “Every marine has three birthdays: the day his mother issued him onto this earth, the day the Marine Corps was formed—November 10, 1775—and the day he graduated from boot camp and was addressed for the first time as a marine,” he writes. In 1966, when he joined the Corps, those birthdays were all too often cut short. He learned his lessons well, principally the one that teaches a Marine not just how to kill, but also to be willing to do so. His time in boot camp is a pointed reminder that Lee Ermey wasn’t exaggerating in his performance in Full Metal Jacket: More than once, Musgrave found himself “in a complete world of shit for being the ‘stupidest motherfucker on earth.’ ” Even so dubbed, he emerged a tough-as-nails private who served on long patrols and mounted ambushes, getting plenty of trigger time. At night, he recalls, he and his fellow Marines amused themselves by pondering how they would most and least like to die. After the war, Musgrave went to a conservative college in Kansas, but the misgivings began to build, especially after Kent State and, less well known, Jackson State. Musgrave volunteered to help the Black Panthers serve meals, then joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and was one of the fighters who tossed their medals over a fence erected around the Capitol. There’s not a false note in this book, full of both pride and sorrow. It’s just the retort to those who wonder why Vietnam vets can’t just forget about the past and move on. His thoughtful response: “If you have to ask me why, then I’m not sure I can explain it to you.”
Smart and self-aware, Musgrave delivers one of the best recent books on America’s experience in Vietnam.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-451-49357-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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