In the hands of a Junger or Krakauer, this story might have taken more memorable form. Still, Vietnam War completists will...
Sometimes-trudging, sometimes-moving narrative of a combat mission gone terribly wrong and the layers of politics and memory surrounding it.
Roy Benavidez (1935-1998) was the first noncommissioned officer to be awarded a West Point saber and the first enlisted soldier to lend his name to a Navy ship. He was also extraordinarily valiant, knowingly putting himself in harm’s way to save his fellow fighters when their mission took them into a hornet’s nest of North Vietnamese soldiers. Unfortunately for all concerned, their battle took place in supposedly neutral Cambodia, where Americans weren’t supposed to be. As Blehm (Fearless: The Undaunted Courage and Ultimate Sacrifice of Navy SEAL Team SIX Operator Adam Brown, 2012, etc.) divines, it was probably that geographical detail that kept Benavidez from winning a Medal of Honor, something corrected a dozen years after the fact. The author’s long-held fascination with all things Green Beret continues apace here, and his thorough reconstruction of the ill-fated battle is reminiscent of C.D.B. Bryan’s much differently intended exposé Friendly Fire (1976). At spots, the narrative is too portentous and detail-caressing, in the way of civilians when writing of battle: “He flipped a switch, and Roy heard the discord of battle from a little speaker that buzzed with static: the sharp, repeated crack of rifle fire, the muffled impact of explosions, and, most unnerving, the cursing and urgent calls for air support and extraction.” Or, “he was going to fight the red tide of communism before it crossed the oceans and crashed onto the shores of America.” A little goes a long way, especially when a single firefight stretches for pages. Overall, the narrative seems a good magazine article pulled into book length, with some slipshod moments (e.g., one doesn’t get a master’s degree in Shakespeare) and too many draggy stretches.
In the hands of a Junger or Krakauer, this story might have taken more memorable form. Still, Vietnam War completists will be interested.Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3951-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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