Though anecdotal and with a small sample set, Messner’s narrative points the way for other activists seeking to build...
Portraits of warriors seeking peace.
Military veterans are putatively honored in this military-minded country. However, writes Messner (Sociology and Gender Studies/Univ. of Southern California; King of the Wild Suburb: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons and Guns, 2011, etc.), “the voices of actual veterans who have fought our wars are mostly under the radar.” That is especially true, he adds, of veterans who have returned from war and now advocate peace—and resistance to war. Here, the author focuses closely on veterans of America’s most recent wars—in order, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War—to consider how their experiences intertwine with their activism and with their own self-identities. In the case of the WWII veteran–turned–peace activist, for instance, the “wartime thread…constitutes less than 2 percent of the tapestry of his life.” Yet, for all its brevity, his wartime experiences have proved formative, at least in part because he manifested symptoms of PTSD half a century after the war ended. Messner also examines the differing cultures to which veterans returned. In the case of Vietnam, the war was unpopular, but the anti-war movement “vibrant,” so that it included “thousands of antiwar veterans.” The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, conversely, are ongoing and have yet to form a defining counterculture. Still, as one veteran/activist who saw naval duty in Operation Iraqi Freedom observes, wars make veterans who share common experiences: He was “adopted” by Vietnam veterans, who in turn encouraged activism in such areas as opposing the Trump administration’s anti-Muslim mandates, building a modern movement called Veterans for Peace, “calling for peace at home and abroad,” as the veteran says. “Not just calling for it, but working for it…and putting our bodies on the line for it.”
Though anecdotal and with a small sample set, Messner’s narrative points the way for other activists seeking to build popular opposition movements.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-978802-81-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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