Wolff continues his memoirs in this excellent volume, with his keen prose, dispassionate mordancy, and writer's attention to mood and characters applied to Vietnam's moral absurdity. The target rifles, scout troops, and juvenile delinquency described in This Boy's Life (1989) find ironic parallels here in M-16s, Special Forces, and wartime cynicism. After flunking out of prep school and jumping ship in the merchant marine, Wolff drifted into the army at 18 in 1965, having given little real thought to either the war or adulthood. Basic training and officer's candidate school subsequently confirmed to him his unsuitability for the soldier's life while the Army mechanically processed him along. His field posting as a military liaison to the South Vietnamese army, however, was less hazardous than his boot-camp peers' lethal assignments to the north. Initially, his most complicated mission was trading a Chinese rifle for a distant base's color TV in time for the ``Bonanza'' Thanksgiving special, and his luck held throughout the constant threat of Vietcong snipers and even the Tet Offensive. Alongside the obtuse inefficiency of his gung-ho replacement and the ``Quiet American'' idealism of a Foreign Service friend, Wolff's potential for youthful self-delusion and malevolence are only heightened in Vietnam; these are expressed in his insincere defense of the war in an argument with the father of a friend (who would desert just before shipping out) and his willful negligence to spite an officer, which resulted in a hamlet being flattened under a hovering Chinook helicopter. After coming unscathed out of this dispiriting and undistinguished tour of duty, Wolff attended a send-off party with Vietnamese hosts who, in mocking recognition of his services, served a dog stew made from the puppy he had adopted on his arrival. If less intense than his earlier memoir's portrayal of a troubled childhood, this candid work evenly weighs the many costs and few gains of coming of age in a war.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40217-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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