A deeply personal, at times moving story of one man’s American experience.
A husband, soldier, and public servant tells his own story.
Belied by its somewhat self-aggrandizing title, Vernon’s debut nonfiction is actually an unassuming, heartfelt memoir concentrating on his difficult and abuse-ridden formative years, his experiences in the Army, rising to the rank of colonel before his retirement, and his 2011 bid for the U.S. Senate. His account opens with his hardscrabble childhood years and gains momentum as he enlists in the Army in 1977. His military career had quite a few dramatic highlights, including service in Bosnia guarding the War Crimes Tribunal and a stint in Saudi Arabia, where he served in close proximity to his wife, who worked in the nearby diplomatic compound. In Saudi Arabia, he had a close call, narrowly avoiding death or injury during a bombing of Army headquarters in Riyadh in November 1995. “Sunlight completely illuminated the cafeteria, where only minutes earlier, both my wife and I would have been eating our lunch,” he writes. “The entire east wall had been blown out.” With appealing humility, the climactic chapters detail his run for the U.S. Senate: “the road to politics is akin to the road to a music career,” he says. “The problem with what I’ve just said is that I can’t sing a lick, so politics seems much more do-able!” He faced growing disillusionment with his fellow Republicans, many of whom struck him as shallow and greedy (although he was impressed by GOP candidate Mitt Romney). All these stories are illuminated by Vernon’s love for his wife and family. More controversial to some readers will be the short essays collected at the back of the book on subjects like Planned Parenthood—“its true mission is to generate big bucks”—gun control, the many failings of “progressives” like President Barack Obama, and the “reckless and tyrannical style of government” into which the country has fallen. These essays risk turning off readers won over by the likable narrator in the book’s earlier sections.
A deeply personal, at times moving story of one man’s American experience.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502895189
Page Count: 228
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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