Son of Gen. Lewis ``Chesty'' Puller, the most decorated Marine ever, the author is a Vietnam vet who lost both legs and parts of both hands in the war. Here is his story, which seems to have as much to say about alcoholism as it does about the plight of the veteran. Puller does not acknowledge that he was an alcoholic prior to the war but, through the events he describes, the reader becomes aware of possible early-stage alcoholism. During the weeks prior to his departure for Officer Candidate School, for example, he embarked on a crash course of physical conditioning because of his ``four years of abuse'' to his body; on the day he graduated from OCS, he made sure that he ``had time to sign in...and still pick up a bottle...before the package store closed.'' And Puller recounts his drinking on his belated honeymoon and on the plane to Vietnam as a matter of course. His relationship with his father was one of admiration, he reports, though his early experience as a platoon leader convinced him that a military career was not for him. This and other steps in self-knowledge, however, appear to have been interrupted by his severe wounding. His description of his recovery is painful, heroic—and always clouded by alcohol. Even his sexual reunion in the hospital with his wife is accompanied by ``early afternoon tippling.'' In August 1969, as he began to ``look more closely at the Vietnam War and the leadership in Washington,'' he was angered by a mild statement made by another veteran in defense of protesters' right to free speech: in response, he ``[drank] too much that evening.'' Through long self-struggle, however, Puller has licked booze and now works as an attorney. Puller writes well; his story will appeal to veterans and their families, as well as those interested in the relationship between substance abuse and self-fulfillment.
Pub Date: June 17, 1991
ISBN: 0-8021-1218-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
