A direct, dispassionate memoir by one of the Navy’s most highly decorated soldiers.
An unsentimental personal account of the Vietnam War.
With the assistance of magazine writer Riebling, retired SEAL master chief Keith chronicles a tale that’s oddly refreshing in its clear-eyed bluntness. The author and his tough-as-nails team had jobs to do, he writes, carrying out missions protecting friendly villages from Viet Cong attacks; they simply did not have time to let the brutal surroundings affect them. The narrative opens with the SEALs surrounded by explosions and tracer fire as they wait to be extracted by helicopter. Keith was not consumed by fear, as most people would be. Instead, he reflected on how the red tracer fire was “as beautiful as any Fourth of July fireworks display” and how lucky he felt to be doing a job he loved. The son of a Navy chief and the grandson of two Army veterans, from an early age Keith dreamed of entering the military, and his determination and skill led him to the elite Navy SEALs. There’s little doubt that he was born to be a soldier, as his hard-nosed, complete-the-mission training comes through on every page of this memoir. When one of his soldiers died, he took lessons from the circumstances of the death rather than spend precious time mourning or dwelling on the life-or-death scenarios he faced on a daily basis. Keith’s prose leans toward Mickey Spillane–like hypermasculinity—he describes a beautiful woman as having “hit the jackpot” on the “genetic wheel of fortune”—and the author dwells on technical aspects of weaponry to the point of distraction. Nonetheless, he provides a tough, unphilosophical account of the job of war.
A direct, dispassionate memoir by one of the Navy’s most highly decorated soldiers.Pub Date: July 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37904-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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
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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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