A powerful story of overcoming adversity and finding religion.
In Vu’s (Lord Jesus, I Want to See…, 2017) biography, a young man flees Communist Vietnam and finds solace in his Christian faith.
Viet grew up in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood, not far from bustling Saigon, which was initially untouched by the disturbances brought to the country by war. But then the bombing campaigns eventually arrived and food rationing became a necessity. Viet’s family, in dire straits, was forced to butcher their beloved dog for food, and to burn paper money for fuel with which to cook. But even after the war concluded, their troubles persisted as the tyrannical Communist regime exacted vengeance upon people who collaborated with the government in the south. When Viet was 5 years old, his father was sent to a labor camp, where he languished under woeful conditions for 12 years. By Viet’s sophomore year in high school, he realized that he would never get full access to educational opportunities, so his parents plotted his escape. Several times, he tried unsuccessfully to flee Vietnam, and once, he ended up in prison. Finally, he was able to find his way out by boat; he survived the threat of pirates and was almost reduced to cannibalism to survive. He was rescued by a South Korean tanker, however, and made his way to Singapore, and then to the United States. There, he was able not only to pursue a college education, but also devote himself to his spiritual life—he eventually became a Catholic priest. Vu’s prose is lucid and unadorned by literary embellishment. Viet’s story is a remarkable one, and it will be impossible for readers not to be gripped by his relentless perseverance. Even more impressively, his spirits rarely seem to sag, no matter what misfortune visits him, and the crux of the tale is not his travails, but the consolations that he finds in his religious faith. Although this is principally a personal remembrance, it also provides a historically fascinating peek into postwar Vietnam; even though the United States was able to eventually extricate itself from the war in 1975, Vietnam’s plight was only just beginning.
A powerful story of overcoming adversity and finding religion.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4575-5816-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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