by Tom Garvey ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2015
A slightly different kind of Vietnam tale by a gifted writer.
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An ambitious debut novella that offers a Vietnam war story with a clever plot device involving astrology, dreams, and omens.
Debut novelist Garvey, a Vietnam veteran, focuses on one man, Lt. John “Bat Guano” McManus, in a tale based on a true story. McManus grows up with his uncles’ war stories and years later, in 1968, he impulsively joins the army. In his last week stateside, he chances upon a book by astrologer Sidney Omar (apparently based on the real-life Sydney Omarr). A random opening of the text gives him a page on “August, the 17th” and he becomes hooked by the carefully ambiguous entry, which says that the day calls for, among other things, “an unpremeditated act of courage, and that he would have to pass some cosmic test.” (This conceit may sound hokey, but readers will find that Garvey manages to pull it off.) The 17th of August, as a concept, “crawled inside his head, made a nest, and fouled it.” The story then marches inexorably to its fiery climax, when McManus’ men find themselves camped near the Cambodian border facing an enemy who outnumbers them by perhaps 20-to-1. Much of his outfit is composed of Montagnards—fierce, and fiercely independent, mountain people whom McManus comes to respect deeply and even love. They, like him, are avid believers in dreams as omens, which fosters a very strong bond between the young lieutenant and his grunts. Garvey does a good job of building suspense—one can almost see the calendar pages flip by—as August 17, 1968, looms, the exact day when the North Vietnamese military plans to launch a massive assault. McManus, as Garvey portrays him, is far from gung-ho; in fact, he’s very ambivalent about the war and terrified most of the time, but he has a job to do, and he does it honorably. The climax is a scene which begs for the big screen treatment—and McManus lives through it to tell the tale. Overall, Garvey writes tightly and economically with hardly a wasted word, when so many other Vietnam books tend to sprawl. And at the end, he includes a poem which does creditable homage to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”
A slightly different kind of Vietnam tale by a gifted writer.Pub Date: June 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5142-2815-9
Page Count: 146
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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