A nail-biting account of one man’s quiet heroism in the face of impossible odds.
Memoir of a bank manager’s unlikely role in the evacuation of South Vietnamese from war-torn mid-1970s Saigon.
With the assistance of Demery (Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam's Madame Nhu, 2013), Riordan chronicles his time as a mild-mannered manager of a bank in Saigon and his more important role as a savior of dozens of South Vietnamese families fleeing the rolling juggernaut of communism in 1975. The author first got acquainted with Vietnam through his 15-month tour of duty in the United States Army, but then he found himself in a new and seemingly passive role in international financial services. By the spring of 1975, what seemed like a routine civilian position became the last outpost of American financial interests in South Vietnam and the setting for the final airlift of Americans and South Vietnamese out of the country. Although the narrative lacks the dramatic punch of a more seasoned writer, Riordan builds his story in measured prose, giving a vivid sense of the history of Vietnam that comes from lived experience rather than research. At the height of the crisis in Saigon, the author was faced with a choice that no one should ever have to make. Although he was told to limit his evacuees to American citizens, he found an ingenious way to also save many of his longtime South Vietnamese bank colleagues—by exploiting an obscure legal loophole that involved, amazingly, passing his colleagues off as family. “I wasn’t trying to be a hero,” he writes, “but it seemed right to me to at least try to help my colleagues and my friends. When I could not stand by, they all became my family. Now they have become our neighbors, our friends, and our fellow Americans. In the case of these 106 lives, the tragic and chaotic end of the [war] became the beginning of something new.”
A nail-biting account of one man’s quiet heroism in the face of impossible odds.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61039-503-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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