An absorbing firsthand saga of war's invisible casualties.
A Vietnam vet's wife fights a long battle with her husband's post-traumatic stress disorder in this poignant memoir.
When her husband Jim, a 27-year-old Marine, returned intact from Vietnam in 1969, the author hoped that the couple could resume their lives as before. But although Jim bore no physical scars from his year in combat, his psychic wounds ran deep. Indeed, he hardly seemed to have left the war. He was plagued by nightmares and flashbacks in which he would call for medevac choppers or imagine himself surrounded by enemies. He veered between hypervigilance and catatonic staring, insisted on sitting with his back to a wall so he could survey his perimeter, and was spooked by both loud noises and silence; only the soothing sound of crickets could convince him there was nothing lying in wait. Over the decades, Jim's illness took a heavy toll; he lost jobs and eventually became unemployable, withdrew emotionally from his wife and sons and endured periodic hospitalizations. (In the author's telling, the Veterans Administration long ignored the Vietnam-era PTSD epidemic and was more a hindrance than a help in coping with Jim's problems.) In her clear-eyed memoir, King draws a subtle, layered portrait of her lost soul of a husband. Sometimes he seems unreachable, sunk in memories of Vietnam and of his buddies who didn't make it back (or in guilt over his own survival) and unable to carry out the simplest project; but he also devotedly serves as a volunteer fireman and pulls himself together to help his wife through crises and grief. It is as much the author's story as Jim's, as she struggles to hold the family together and fathom the stranger her husband has become, and to reclaim her own personality from the ravages of "secondary" PTSD. With America's latest conflicts still generating victims, this is a very timely book: an anguished, unsparing, but ultimately hopeful view of the heartbreak of PTSD.
An absorbing firsthand saga of war's invisible casualties.Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4415-7354-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
