A small gem of a dual memoir in which a former US Navy riverboat commander and a young Vietnamese woman tell amazing, intersecting tales of war and peace. Huchthausen went to Vietnam in 1967, five years after graduating from the US Naval Academy. There he commanded a patrol riverboat on the Mekong River before, during, and after the cataclysmic Tet Offensive of 1968. It was an often harrowing tour of duty, but also one in which Huchthausen gained an appreciation for the Vietnamese people. The person he came to admire most was a ten-year-old girl, Nguyen Thi Lung, whose life he and his crewmen saved after she was severely wounded. Following her recovery, Huchthausen and several other Navy men adopted the little girl, paying for her rehabilitation and schooling. But when Huchthausen was transferred to another assignment, he lost touch with Nguyen. Seventeen years later, after years of desperate hardship and through an almost miraculous series of events, Nguyen was able to contact Huchthausen. In 1985 Nguyen was allowed to emigrate under Huchthausen's sponsorship to the US, where she lives today with her daughter. The ex-Navy man and the former peasant girl tell their truth-is-stranger-than-fiction stories extremely well in alternating voices. Huchthausen's portion relates a tale familiar to American readers of veteran-penned Vietnam war memoirs: an in- country war story with plenty of action. Nguyen's tale is less familiar but more instructive to American audiences. Her simple sentences beautifully evoke the everyday realities of Mekong Delta village life and the fearful times she was forced to endure after the North Vietnamese victory in 1975. An uplifting human story with a deservedly happy ending. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1996
ISBN: 1-877853-41-0
Page Count: 152
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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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