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LEE

An affecting, if occasionally digressive, remembrance.

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In this debut memoir, Farmer recalls growing up with an older brother who was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The author describes the struggles of his late brother, Lee, who was four years his senior and whose life was deeply affected by mental illness. The memoir opens in Erlanger, Kentucky, in 1961, with the happy memory of the author and his brother playing carefree in the rain as children. This “idyllic experience” is abruptly contrasted with a traumatic recollection of 9-year-old Lee being whipped by their father. Lee serves as the author’s mentor, stepping in for a sometimes-errant father and for a mother coping with paralysis. However, the author’s brother began to display signs of odd behavior at age 12, such as formulating grandiose, impractical plans to run away to Florida to hunt tropical fish. Lee later became prone to violent episodes, and the author overheard him whispering to himself. The family was forced to propose that Lee should be committed to a mental institution. The author goes on to describe his difficult relationship with his brother, who attempted suicide; the deaths of their parents; and coming to terms with Lee’s later terminal illness. Farmer is an expressive writer who deftly pinpoints emotions; his evocation of the joy of childhood play is captivating: “We lay on our backs in the grass, gazed at the clouds above us, and drank the rain as it hit the back of our throats. It tasted pure, fresh, and free.” As the memoir develops, the author astutely captures how Lee’s mental illness revealed itself incrementally and also emphasizes how potential signs of schizophrenia are often overlooked. On occasion, Farmer shares unnecessarily digressive detail about everyday moments: “Technically, milk was a drink, and we always had the right to have one with our food, but the chocolate in this one made it similar to a dessert.” However, such moments are by no means a major distraction from this candid, erudite story.

An affecting, if occasionally digressive, remembrance.

Pub Date: June 27, 2023

ISBN: 9781645385462

Page Count: 334

Publisher: Ten16 Press

Review Posted Online: May 4, 2023

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ROGUE WARRIOR

The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)

Pub Date: March 2, 1992

ISBN: 0-671-70390-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Pocket

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992

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THE QUIVERING TREE

Great fun.

The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.

Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.

Great fun.

Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990

ISBN: 312-04986-2

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

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