There are bad feelings aplenty in this angry memoir, not just with respect to Pham’s own experience but because of the fate...
Who lost the Vietnam War? By Vietnamese refugee turned U.S. Marine Pham’s account, it wasn’t the much-maligned South Vietnamese soldier.
Pham opens this slender memoir with both barrels blazing, voicing unkind thoughts about “six U.S. presidents, the U.S. Congress, arrogant Pentagon leaders from the supposed ‘greatest generation, [and] hippie antiwar protestors,” along with the press corps, the South Vietnamese leadership and, of course, the victorious Communists, who made him a refugee in 1975. He was luckier than his father, a South Vietnamese combat pilot who served a dozen years in hard-labor prison camps that were meant to reeducate him; when he was finally released and allowed to go to the United States, whose interest he had faithfully served, he “never received a welcome home, veteran’s benefits, or a pension.” Well, as we know, homegrown veterans of Vietnam have been ill served, too, and Pham, a veteran of a later conflict, discovered for himself that there’s a steady supply of dishonor in service: following in his father’s footsteps, this time as a pilot in the very unit for which his father flew support, he was taunted, called a Viet Cong and subjected to daily rations of racism. The tough Marine, who spices his narrative with due saltiness—replying to a columnist who asked during the 2004 election whether anyone still cares about Vietnam, Pham grumbles, “I fucking care”—admits to an ethnic blunder or two himself, once confusing a general’s Asian wife for a cleaning woman. But what he encounters in these pages is clearly a pattern of discrimination that drove him from the service after Gulf War I. “I could have gone as far as I wanted in the Corps,” he writes, “but it was no longer worth the stress.”
There are bad feelings aplenty in this angry memoir, not just with respect to Pham’s own experience but because of the fate of his homeland, which, he protests, should have been worth defending at least as much as South Korea—and, he adds, perhaps even Iraq.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-89141-873-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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