A Vietnam memoir with zero punches pulled, related by one of the most incisive observers of the American political scene.
Acclaimed political cartoonist Danziger looks back at his year in Vietnam, somehow managing to convey difficult truths without completely depressing readers.
Drafted shortly after graduating college in 1968, Danziger believed (as many did) that the war was in its final stages. He reported to Fort Dix hoping the worst would be over before he could be sent overseas. He offers detailed, often amusing accounts of the ill-focused basic training, which was “phenomenally stupid, left over from World War II and ha[d] nothing to do with conditions in Southeast Asia. It was this side of mad.” Seeking ways to further delay deployment, he entered language school to learn Vietnamese, assuming he would then be stationed far from combat zones, interpreting intercepted signals from the field. But the instruction was perfunctory at best, and after acceptance to officer training—another ploy to postpone deployment—Danziger was sent for ordnance training, and his language skills eroded quickly. Then he was deployed to Vietnam, where he was one of many junior officers with inadequate training and no enthusiasm for the missions. The author’s account of his year “in-country” is consistently candid about the futility of the war, and he makes little effort to portray his own role as anything but ineffectual. The book’s title plays on the Vietnamese’s attempts to pronounce his name. Looking back, as if trying to explain the era to a younger audience, he tries to provide perspective. Subsequent history shows that America learned nothing from Vietnam, he writes; the country has entered one unwinnable war after another, with few moments of success and thousands of lives lost. Unsettling as these truths may be, Danziger’s compelling presentation of his experience makes the book a must-read war memoir. The author aptly opens his trenchant book with an epigraph from Joseph Heller.
A Vietnam memoir with zero punches pulled, related by one of the most incisive observers of the American political scene.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-58642-273-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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