One soldier’s chaotic life serves as an instructive microcosm of the American military experience in Vietnam.
Hartman effectively captures the hectic life at a medical clearinghouse in this exhaustive journal of his in country experiences during the Vietnam War.
Hartman explains that he enlisted as a Goldwater conservative—“I hated liberals, ‘pinkos’, and socialists, but above all I hated that filthy slave of Moscow and Peking, Ho Chi Minh”—but his view of the war changed. “I had turned against the Vietnam adventure,” he says, “that grossly mistaken attempt to prop up the corrupt mandarins, landlords and generals of the Saigon regime against their own people.” Still, after contemplating a draft dodge in Canada, he went to Nam—“not out of patriotism, but out of fear: of being forever cut off from friends and family in the USA, of someday being grabbed by FBI slave-catchers and dragged back to a life sentence.” Per the memoir’s appropriate subtitle, the highs for Hartman included his indulging in many of the easily available drugs to numb the pain and exhaustion of working for the American military. The lows, which the surgical tech thoroughly tallies, involved many wounded and dead soldiers who passed through “Charley Med.” Sprinkled into the journal are doses of politics: “The American public—a huge, inscrutable, torpid, star-spangled toad—didn’t catch on,” he says. “‘America—love it or leave it’, said many bumper stickers, foreshadowing the equally stupid ‘Support our troops’ of Junior Bush’s regime.” Also appearing throughout is correspondence documenting his relationship with Stella, the girl he left behind in Texas. Hartman successfully adds perspective to the journal with narrative jumps in time that place his Vietnam year within the timeline of his life. The large cast of characters and military acronyms are difficult to manage, though they undoubtedly contributed to the feeling he and many others had of being overwhelmed by the military machine. Likewise, his recording of endless drug use by himself and fellow soldiers will leave many impressed, though the psychotropic jumble of observations goes toward explaining the continuing effects of the Vietnam War, not just on its participants, but on the American psyche.
One soldier’s chaotic life serves as an instructive microcosm of the American military experience in Vietnam.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 591
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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