Son of Gen. Lewis ``Chesty'' Puller, the most decorated Marine ever, the author is a Vietnam vet who lost both legs and parts of both hands in the war. Here is his story, which seems to have as much to say about alcoholism as it does about the plight of the veteran. Puller does not acknowledge that he was an alcoholic prior to the war but, through the events he describes, the reader becomes aware of possible early-stage alcoholism. During the weeks prior to his departure for Officer Candidate School, for example, he embarked on a crash course of physical conditioning because of his ``four years of abuse'' to his body; on the day he graduated from OCS, he made sure that he ``had time to sign in...and still pick up a bottle...before the package store closed.'' And Puller recounts his drinking on his belated honeymoon and on the plane to Vietnam as a matter of course. His relationship with his father was one of admiration, he reports, though his early experience as a platoon leader convinced him that a military career was not for him. This and other steps in self-knowledge, however, appear to have been interrupted by his severe wounding. His description of his recovery is painful, heroic—and always clouded by alcohol. Even his sexual reunion in the hospital with his wife is accompanied by ``early afternoon tippling.'' In August 1969, as he began to ``look more closely at the Vietnam War and the leadership in Washington,'' he was angered by a mild statement made by another veteran in defense of protesters' right to free speech: in response, he ``[drank] too much that evening.'' Through long self-struggle, however, Puller has licked booze and now works as an attorney. Puller writes well; his story will appeal to veterans and their families, as well as those interested in the relationship between substance abuse and self-fulfillment.
Pub Date: June 17, 1991
ISBN: 0-8021-1218-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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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