Karlin works on a small scale, bringing all the senses into play as he describes acts both of turpitude and decency in this...
Personal encounters with Vietnam, past and present, in a web of prickly memory.
When editor and novelist Karlin (The Wished for Country, 2002, etc.) is hired to work on the film Song of the Stork, his 1966–67 tour in Vietnam begins to unreel again in his mind, like a movie: “It had been like that even then, even as it was happening, and those stories seeped back in again.” The writing here is trancelike, still and thoughtful, groping toward memory and meaning. The time span goes from 1966 to 2004, from Karlin’s gunner’s position on a helicopter to his later role as a screenwriter aware of the moral complexities of his current work and of that of the soldiers, Vietnamese and American, back then. The writer is edgy, but he has returned to Vietnam many times before and is mindful that he must be patient if he wants to hear the stories of the Vietnamese he’s working with on the film, a number of whom were on the receiving end of his fire, as he was of theirs. Questions of conduct loom large, both for the truthfulness of the movie and for Karlin’s own curiosity about how college-age students today, like those working on Song, would have behaved under the circumstances then. He remembers the effort it took to “move at all in the eardrum-cracking din of a fire fight, as projectiles he has seen split and mutilate the flesh of his companions scribble the air around him,” or the courage that was needed to resist the horror of My Lai, as one helicopter crew did, to its peril. The disorientation of those times is still there as Karlin brings us back to 2004. The disgust and heartsickness, the lies, unworthiness, frustration, and rage of a war—these are things he’ll never shake.
Karlin works on a small scale, bringing all the senses into play as he describes acts both of turpitude and decency in this memoir of a country’s consciousness.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-931896-16-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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