A philosophical, anecdotal, and engaging account about an unlikely veteran.
An author details his varied duties as a Marine during the Vietnam War in this debut memoir.
Despite possessing personal frailties and lacking a clear notion of intent, 21-year-old Choc enlisted in the Marines in fall 1965. Underweight and proficient in typing, he followed the administrative route and ended up in Vietnam as a typist, radioman, mailman, and aide-de-camp to his company’s commanding officer. He was stationed on Hill 55, a popular stop for celebrities like Jayne Mansfield and John Steinbeck looking for in-country photo ops. Despite the alleged safety of Hill 55 and his supposed noncombat duties, Choc experienced his share of pot shots, barrages, and proximity to death. “There must be libraries of war stories out there,” writes Choc as he prepares to submit his to the genre. A bombardment at Khe Sanh—which he mostly slept through, to the extent that when he awoke there was a brand new hole in his roof—decimated a tent mere yards from his and “seared second platoon flesh and bones with cumin spice and deadly bloody condiments tossed randomly about.” One of the author’s more gruesome jobs was to help identify the bodies of those killed in action, as he was one of the few people who, due to his mail delivery duties, knew what everyone looked like. Choc’s prose is ornate and tends toward the literary, though this sometimes leads to awkward syntax that trips up the reader: “Choices were considered amid anxieties of the unknown and hours of deliberation.” The writing flows better and hits harder when the author keeps it simple and direct: “Southeast Asia was a stewpot of wrath, brute will, and confusion.” While much of the book is concerned with his Marine experiences before and after the war, it is the Vietnam section that is the most salient and compelling. There is a bit of Yossarian in Choc’s gun-shy administrator, who inevitably finds violence even as he seeks to avoid it. Fans of Vietnam memoirs should enjoy this more cerebral take on that war and the military of the era.
A philosophical, anecdotal, and engaging account about an unlikely veteran.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9964179-0-7
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Chosen Journey Media
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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