A genre-blending mission report from an atypical disillusioned Vietnam vet.
In this memoir, Mitchell (Nurturing the Souls of Our Children, 2005) describes his Vietnam service and his political, sexual, and philosophical awakening during a subsequent European journey of self-discovery.
Mitchell, the product of a nomadic childhood, attributes his early, magical outlook on life to his “Druid” ancestors; it led him to dance naked on moonlit nights beneath the gaze of the “Goddess of the Moon.” In the 1960s, he was fired up by thoughts of battle—inspired less by Cold War–era, anti-Communist fervor than by a primordial, warrior-spirit calling, à la Achilles at Troy. He put up with dehumanizing boot-camp drills so that he could have the chance to fly helicopter scout missions. But he was struck by the Vietnamese countryside and culture, feeling that the enemy Viet Cong had a personal intimacy with nature that the mechanized, “soulless” American side lacked. (In this, he claims to have foreseen America’s defeat.) When an air crash left Mitchell badly burned, he accepted an honorable discharge without ever having the “catharsis” of taking a foe’s life. Restless, he studied the classics and traveled through Europe, where a life-changing love affair with a dashing, confident German actor finally allowed him to embrace same-sex eros (love) over the siren-song of thanatos (death). In Greece, he had a dream-vision of the goddess again, hinting at a journey of rebirth: As he puts it, “the transformation of the warrior into serving the Eros spirit is the objective of the heroic struggle in the soul between love and death.” As this passage shows, the author offers a highly intellectual Vietnam War memoir that’s more poetic than most pain-wracked soldier stories. His ruminations on mythologies, metaphysics, and human sexuality—both classical and modern—have one foot on the battlefield and the other in New Age philosophy and a gay coming-of-age story. Although this book clearly and eloquently springs from the heart, armchair commandos will find their helmets spinning at the diversity of its target acquisitions.
A genre-blending mission report from an atypical disillusioned Vietnam vet.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4663-1303-3
Page Count: 206
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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