A memoir with a colorful, empathetic voice.
Hosking recounts his experiences in Vietnam and his life with post-traumatic stress disorder in this nonfiction debut.
When the author received his summons to join the Australian Military Forces at the end of 1965, his feelings were mixed, comprised of “patriotic compliance, employment relief, and emotional discontent.” Raised on tales of World War II heroism and a deep hatred of communism, his peers were eager to protect the democracy of South Vietnam from the threat of invasion from the north. Yet Hosking quickly became disillusioned by his military activities, such as seizing crops, forcibly relocating civilians, and fighting enemies who appeared to be underfed teenagers. He survived the war but returned to Australia feeling lost and empty; he proposed to his girlfriend but then called off the engagement. He watched with interest and revulsion as the Australian public turned on the war and as the counterculture swept through the United States. After Saigon fell in 1975, the author decided he needed to get away from it all: he bought a ticket to Athens, Greece, and spent months traveling through Europe, the Middle East, India, and Africa, running away from his past even as he sought to find a purer, deeper version of himself. Hosking is a natural storyteller, weaving his personal narrative through the larger historical and cultural contexts that support it. The first chapter, for example, begins with the image of Hosking as a soldier, nervously pointing his gun at a young Vietnamese farmer and wondering, “Does he have a weapon concealed under the straw?” He then offers a concise but comprehensive explanation of the origins of the conflict, replete with Australian-style color commentary (he refers to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for example, as “two German dropkicks”), before resolving the story of the standoff between him and the villager. The globe-trotting nature of this memoir sets it apart from the familiar there-and-back-again structure of American experiences in Vietnam. Seeing the war through the eyes of an Australian conscript, who then travels widely on a semiredemptive pilgrimage, puts the struggles of Vietnam and PTSD in a different light for American readers.
A memoir with a colorful, empathetic voice.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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