Goes off like an ammo dump.
Sequel to Coonts’s giant editorial effort Combat (2001), which featured ten original long works of military/technothriller fiction. Victory, with many of the same authors, does much the same for WWII, although none of its ten authors fought in that conflict, and few, aside from Harold Robbins, were even born (Coonts was born in 1946).
Harold Robbins? Amazingly, even with four postmortal novels having sprung from his pen, still more has been found, this time a short one, “Blood Bond,” which he apparently wrote during the war or just afterward. It tells of a German-speaking Jewish bigmouth in the OSS whose golden locks help him masquerade in Germany as an SS captain in the black uniform of the Master Race. Coonts himself, a former Air Force pilot, leads off the sheaf with “The Sea Witch,” about a dive-bomber pilot who has three bombers shot out from under him by the Japanese and so is transferred to a Black Cat squadron on New Guinea and winds up downed by a Zero and stranded on an island. The prolific Harold Coyle shows up with “Breakthrough on Bloody Ridge,” a tale about Marines making the first amphibious assault of the war and hitting the beach on what comes to be known as Starvation Island. As with his More Than Courage (see below), Coyle focuses on men with the courage and will to go eye-to-eye with the enemy, especially on a barren spine of land called Bloody Ridge. In R.J. Pineiro’s immensely exciting “The Eagle and the Cross,” a surreal madness sweeps Russian defenses that find themselves bombed and then invaded by German panzers: the Nazis have broken their nonaggression pact! As Coonts makes clear in his introduction, “Only in fiction can the essence of the human experience of war be laid bare . . . . Only through fiction can we prepare ourselves for the trial by fire, when it comes.”
Goes off like an ammo dump.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-87462-6
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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