The high-adventure story of the legendary Boehm—founder and guiding spirit of the famed SEALs, a highly decorated veteran of three wars—and his tumultuous 30-year career in the US Navy. Boehm, with journalist and former Green Beret Sasser, reviews his military memories: He entered the Navy as a teenage WW II recruit in the risky Underwater Demolition Unit; in the Battle of Cape Esperance, after his ship was sunk, he had a fight with a man- eating shark during which he lost his wounded buddy and Boehm himself made a narrow escape. Later he infiltrated Castro's Cuba on an intelligence-gathering mission. He blames JFK for losing his nerve in the Bay of Pigs disaster and calling off US air strikes, thereby exposing Cuban insurgents to death and capture. Boehm believes that the perception that America lacked the courage to resist aggression encouraged the Communists, resulting in the Berlin blockade, Communist infiltration of Latin America, and the Vietnam War. Boehm also believes that inter-service rivalry and bureaucratic inertia were the biggest obstacles to creating the new commando force he envisioned. He fought the system as hard as he fought US enemies, incurring five courts-martial (which were eventually canceled). Called into President Kennedy's office to explain his behavior, Boehm persuaded Kennedy to give him authority to create the most elite special force in the world—the SEALs. Fighting in Vietnam, the carefully selected, courageous, dedicated, adventurous SEALs outclassed the Viet Cong in merciless raids and ambushes. Boehm blames the politicians and high brass for losing the war. According to Boehm, his frank honesty and refusal to compromise where lives were at stake held back his career, and he left the Navy still a lieutenant. Strong, exciting reading, laced with military profanity and humor.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-671-53625-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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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