A visceral reminder of war’s intimate slaughter.
Anguished eyewitness account of the devastation visited upon the civilian Vietnamese population just a month before the massacre of My Lai.
The author was a well-known South Vietnamese poet and novelist then living with her husband and children in Saigon. She was caught in the middle of the Vietcong’s Tet Offensive in early 1968 when she received news that her father had just died and promptly traveled to her native town of Hue, in central Vietnam, for the burial service. The next day, the Communists shelled the Buddhist town, terrorizing the population and waging horrific battles with the combined South Vietnamese Nationalist and American forces over many weeks. The author’s narrative burns with firsthand accounts, her own and those of others who shared their stories, as they all were trapped in blasted houses, churches and makeshift shelters, wounded, starving, sick and overrun by the Communists and their squads of vengeful executioners. In an extensive introduction, the translator of this important work, first published in 1969, just over a year after the horrific events it chronicles, sets up the significance of the large-scale Tet Offensive for the Vietcong, who hoped the South Vietnamese would rise up and support them; the Communists were eventually driven back by the Nationalists and the Americans, leaving thousands dead and unaccounted for. Yet the author’s work speaks for itself; it’s a searing first-person account of the misery of war visited upon her family, neighbors and countrymen, caught in senseless, chaotic horror. The author does not portray the Americans as saviors; rather, in her narrative, they are young, clueless and, in many instances, scornful of this “small yellow-skinned nation” they know little about and so calloused to the sanctity of life that they amuse themselves by shooting at dogs.
A visceral reminder of war’s intimate slaughter.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-253-01417-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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
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
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