Sobering reflections on past treatment of America’s injured war veterans.
The author of Born on the Fourth of July (1976) recounts the brief 1974 movement he initiated to change how Veterans Affairs hospitals cared for wounded soldiers.
Kovic (Around the World in Eight Days, 1984, etc.) returned from the Vietnam War in the early 1970s paralyzed from his chest down. Insomnia, anxiety, depression, bedsores, and lack of sexual function also tormented him. During his stay in VA hospitals located in the Bronx and Long Beach, he observed that the “wards were overcrowded and terribly understaffed”; when bed-ridden soldiers called for help, none came. Kovic began to discuss his situation with other patients and soon realized that the poor treatment he had witnessed was a universal problem that cried out for reform. In the spring of 1973, he organized a group called the Patients’/Workers’ Rights Committee, which was a success among young Vietnam veterans but became the bête noire of older vets and hospital administrators. The group fell apart after Kovic went home to New York; it received new life after he returned to Southern California that fall. At that time, the author created the American Veterans Movement and began looking for ways to publicize the plight of wounded veterans at the national level. His search led him to the idea of occupying California senator Alan Cranston’s office with other AVM members. The sit-in quickly developed into a two-week hunger strike in which veterans demanded a meeting with Donald Johnson, the head of the Veterans Administration. Kovic and his fellow veterans succeeded in making the changes they sought, but the AVM spiraled into chaos afterward, disbanding a few months later after an unsuccessful Independence Day march on Washington. The great strength of this book is that the author never minces words. With devastating candor, he memorializes a short-lived but important movement and the men who made it happen.
Sobering reflections on past treatment of America’s injured war veterans.Pub Date: July 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61775-449-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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