Though the family’s plight is overdetailed, the current war with Iraq gives their story particular relevance.
The daughter of a soldier killed in Vietnam graphically chronicles the permanent wounds his death inflicted on his family.
While she honors all those who like her father served their country in that war, Zacharias is more intent on writing about the pain that war inflicts, not its inherent morality. In the summer of 1966, when she learned of her husband’s death, Shelby Spears was living in a trailer in rural Tennessee with son Frankie, middle child Karen (the author, then a third-grader), and baby Linda. Shelby dropped out of tenth grade in 1953 to marry David, a career soldier who reached the rank of staff sergeant. She liked life as a military wife: she enjoyed being stationed in places like Germany and Hawaii; she found that other families on the bases were always supportive; and health services and schooling were readily available. After David’s death, however, her own family was little help as she struggled with her grief and the problems of raising three children on her own. Zacharias describes moving to Georgia and living in a succession of dingy trailer courts while her mother completed high school, went on to nursing school, and finally earned enough to buy a house for the family. But her success came at considerable cost. Shelby had a number of affairs, often bringing strangers home at night. She left the children alone to fend for themselves while she worked or partied. And she never talked about their father, which hurt the most. Frank turned to drugs, and Karen, though a devout Christian, became pregnant in high school and had an abortion. The family survived, but it was a long and rough haul. They remained haunted by their father’s death, which Zacharias hints may have resulted from friendly fire. The author continues to be active in Vietnam veterans’ affairs.
Though the family’s plight is overdetailed, the current war with Iraq gives their story particular relevance.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-072148-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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