A collection of the pro-war pieces filed from Southeast Asia for Newsday by the Nobel laureate not long before his death.
Editor Barden, a Vietnam veteran and professor (English/Univ. of Toledo; editor: Virginia Folk Legends, 1991, etc.), mostly lets Steinbeck speak for himself in this motley collection of columns that the author framed in the form of letters to Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, the deceased editor and publisher of Newsday, whose husband was continuing in her stead. Barden sandwiches Steinbeck’s columns between an introduction and afterword and intrudes in the text with only a handful of parenthetical explanations—reminding us, for example, who Lurleen Wallace was. Between December 1966 and May 1967, Steinbeck filed pieces that sought to support the U.S. effort in Vietnam, to lionize the soldiers whom he met (and with whom he occasionally ducked incoming rounds), to expose the dimensions of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese violence against civilians, to chide the liberal media for ingesting without question the enemy’s propaganda and to urge other writers (he names Updike, Williams, Bellow, Albee and Miller) to travel to Vietnam to see the war firsthand. Steinbeck did not just sit in Saigon and bloviate; he went to various sites around the country and flew in helicopters and, in one case, the plane dubbed Puff the Magic Dragon, a night mission that frightened him, prompting him to write of mortality. He also offers some tactical suggestions that seem bizarre and naïve: dropping thousands of transistor radios (with earplugs) via paper parachutes over the countryside so rural people could hear the truth; training Saigon street urchins for espionage. Steinbeck’s positions later softened, but not in the pages of Newsday.
Sometimes Steinbeckian in texture and bite, but often tone-deaf, tendentious and surpassingly sad.Pub Date: March 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8139-3257-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | MILITARY | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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