Using the life of one man as his framework, Sheehan (The Arnheiter Affair, 1971) has written the best book on America's involvement in Vietnam since Frances FitzGerald's Fire in the Lake.
John Paul Vann was a visionary as well as a gung-ho army officer. Arriving in Saigon in 1962 as a Lt. Colonel, Vann soon perceived something amiss in the US approach to the blossoming war. The American-backed ruling family, the Ngo Dinhs, were considered foreigners by most of the population; the ARVN existed primarily to protect them and generate graft; and American-supplied weapons were going almost directly to the Viet Cong. Vann was quick to realize that until the US took the loyalties and traditions of the population into account, it would be pouring lives and money into the quagmire to no avail. Vann was to retire and return to Vietnam as a civilian in the Foreign Service before he was listened to; eventually, he was regarded as one of the best minds in the field, and his ideas were adopted (too late to change the outcome) at the highest levels; he died there in a helicopter accident in 1972. Sheehan, a friend of Vann's and one of the many newsmen whose understanding of the war was shaped by him (changing the press's relationship with the military), conducted close to 400 interviews and did exhaustive research to put together this brutal, honest, exciting, often funny book.
His canvas is broad, filled with neatly integrated historical information, sharply observed portraits (from policy level on down), tactical and logistic detail, and insightful political analysis, along with the biography of a fascinating and uniquely American character.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1988
ISBN: 0679643613
Page Count: 1108
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1988
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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