An alternate view of America’s Vietnam experience from a worthy participant who left behind not bomb craters but chickens,...
A poultry specialist recalls a two-year tour in Vietnam in this unassuming memoir of a noncombatant who, in his own way, worked to win the hearts and minds of the people.
Debut author Hargreaves arrived in Vietnam in 1965 as a fresh-out-of college member of the International Voluntary Services, a precursor of the Peace Corps. “I didn’t come to Vietnam to fight a war,” he says. Instead, he used what he learned about avoiding the Ku Klux Klan as a voter registration volunteer in Mississippi a year earlier to avoid the Viet Cong in sometimes-dicey situations. Posted to Phan Rang, a provincial capital of 18,000 on the central coast, he witnessed over the next two years a massive buildup of American combat troops there and elsewhere that transformed cities and villages and turned too many children and their adult handlers into crafty beggars. He stayed as far away as he could from the war, which, to his regret, gradually undermined American aid and education programs of the preceding 12 years, preferring instead to talk about chickens with peasants over green coconut milk, help arrange pickups of military garbage for pig feed, or cultivate grapes. Villagers scoured military dumps for salvageable wood from napalm crates for building chicken houses. He describes this endeavor without so much as a whiff of irony or any words about the horrors of this flesh-burning, defoliating petroleum jelly. This is in keeping with a nonjudgmental narrative that frequently comes across like offhanded recollections told around a campfire. The flat tone and the triviality of some anecdotes tend to deprive the storytelling of deeper meaning. But Hargreaves is not without opinions or a sense of history. He notes that the United States might have done better in Vietnam by listening to and understanding its people, just as a good veterinarian learns to listen to the chickens. The author’s deep affection for Vietnam, and for its cuisine, reveals itself in his several aid-oriented visits to the country in the years since his tour.
An alternate view of America’s Vietnam experience from a worthy participant who left behind not bomb craters but chickens, pigs and grapes.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1458213501
Page Count: 108
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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