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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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