An eloquent military memoir in which the author seems to be grooming for his next move: What will it be?
Former Virginia senator Webb (A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, 2008, etc.) employs hard lessons from his own life to explain his reasons for not seeking re-election in 2012.
The author, who also served as the secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan, initially parlayed his Marine experience in Vietnam into a first-class war novel, Fields of Fire (1978), among other thoughtful works. In this memoir, he sandwiches his life as a baby boomer military brat (born 1946) between scenes of his leaving the Capitol office, where he served as a one-term senator between 2006 and 2012. Refusing any longer to be part of “an institution with a 6 percent approval rating,” he writes, he is nonetheless sadly cognizant of how distraught his own World War II veteran father, now deceased, would be for his son’s walking away from what his father considered “the top of [his] game.” Having moved around during his youth among a variety Air Force bases, largely under the care of his Arkansas-born mother and gritty, devoted grandmother, Webb had a spotty early education but was duly indoctrinated to patriotic values of hard work, physical toughness and self-reliance. Raised within a vigorous peacetime Army, Webb knew he was “born to be a soldier”—and what a solider he was, winning the Navy Cross, the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts. From his acceptance to the Naval Academy’s class of 1968 to his time in the Marine Corps and shipping out to Vietnam at the height of the war’s unpopularity, Webb conveys the intensity of his training and single-minded pursuit. He has made peace with the “emotional tangle” of the war and is, overall, gracious toward his family and others humbly born and hard-striving who deserve a “system that guarantees true fairness.”
An eloquent military memoir in which the author seems to be grooming for his next move: What will it be?Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4112-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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