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
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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