An uneven document, at times rich in the details of one man’s psyche and life in Middle America, at other times a raging...
The journal of a grueling, risk-filled rafting trip down the Mississippi River, interspersed with the author’s still-vivid memories of his experience as a young marine in the Gulf War.
Eriksen, now an antiwar activist, had promised himself while in Kuwait in 1991 that he would make this river trip through the heart of America, and more than a decade later he makes good on that promise, partly to reconnect with his country and partly, in his words, to find himself. The Bottle Rocket, his homemade pontoon raft supported by plastic soda bottles and equipped with a pedal-powered paddle wheel, is too ungainly for the shallow waters of the northernmost part of the river, which he traverses in a canoe in August, but it serves as his home from September 2003 to January 2004. In October, he is joined by his ex-fiancée Jenna, who shares his hardships and both annoys and assists him. Life aboard a raft, with days spent dodging barges and floating trees and other obstacles, and nights usually spent outdoors in a sleeping bag, is rough, but people they meet along the way are often remarkably helpful, providing hot meals, showers and warm, dry beds. Woven into Eriksen’s account of this journey are his recollections of his gung-ho boyhood, his training as a marine and most of all his months in Kuwait, where the erstwhile warrior becomes a disillusioned, bored looter in a filthy, stinking, death-filled desert, outraged to find the enemy equipped with American arms. During the Iraq war, Eriksen, a member of Veterans for Peace, demonstrates from coast to coast against the rising death toll. What has been a gripping journal-cum-memoir becomes a tirade against the administration, its advisors and corporations that profit from war. Patriotic young Americans today, he says, are dying “not for freedom, democracy, or protection of the homeland, but for the profit and political survival of a powerful few.”
An uneven document, at times rich in the details of one man’s psyche and life in Middle America, at other times a raging op-ed piece.Pub Date: April 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-8070-7275-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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