A complex, potentially alienating writing style clouds this unique war memoir.
Deaton’s (The Death of Maria Chavarria, 2012) Vietnam memoir offers medical narratives amid the complexities of war.
In 1967, Deaton was at the end of his rope. He had a career and a family, but also an overpowering addiction to barbiturates. In light of his increasingly erratic impulses and worried about the destruction his downward spiral could wreak on the ones he loved, Deaton volunteered for the Vietnam War. The war would either cure or kill him, but he was so focused on the end results that he didn’t fully comprehend what was ahead. Deaton’s thoughts and perceptions were scattered by both pills and the action of the world around him, and while the narration supports this feeling, the style can be awkward for readers. Meaning gets muddled in shifts to the present tense and in overly verbose descriptions: “The building itself was smug. It was as smug as a jukebox on a Saturday night, as smug as an organ-grinder with twin monkeys, as smug as the villain in every plot of gothic dimensions.” Once Deaton arrives in Vietnam, the style seems more apt. Quitting his drug habit wasn’t the immediate, cold turkey affair he’d imagined, and his moods and heavy hangovers were just as much a problem as they were at home. He was still constantly tempted, both by substances and the women around him, despite his marriage vows. At the same time, he butted heads with other doctors and soldiers, his authority issues with matters of medical treatment creating conflict with the military rank and file. While many of his early cases make for mundane reading, the realities of war sweep in, threatening Deaton’s life more than once. Danger turns real, interpersonal conflict becomes collegial respect, and his addiction seems certain to be discovered. As patients’ stories fill up the sometimes-gruesome narrative, it’s seldom clear how Deaton’s tour of duty will turn out. Change, like war, was an inevitability.
A complex, potentially alienating writing style clouds this unique war memoir.Pub Date: April 24, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 417
Publisher: Kindle Direct Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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