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
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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