Bass writes himself into the story too much, but the intriguing character of An provides the center of a fascinating account.
Swiftly paced narrative of a Vietnamese James Bond who worked both sides of the game.
Bass (English and Journalism/Univ. of Albany; The Predictors, 1999, etc.), whose 1996 book Vietnamerica concerned Amerasian children of the Vietnam War, returns to Indochina to flesh out a story he wrote for the New Yorker a few years ago. His subject, a former Reuters and Time correspondent named Pham Xuan An, proved to be a lively, often prickly interlocutor. He had received official clearance for the magazine piece, but he still knew things that no one else was supposed to know—most likely why the man known as Agent Z.21 chose not to speak on the record for the book. The result is “the unauthorized biography of a spy,” Bass writes. An, the author reveals, was renowned for his skills as a reporter and writer—but also as a storyteller capable of spinning entertaining yarns over a hotel bar for hours on end. He was also famed, among certain compatriots, for endlessly detailed reports that made Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap “clap their hands with glee and exclaim over the verve and narrative grip of the Tolstoy in their midst.” It was An, for instance, who revealed to Hanoi information that American ground forces were first on their way to Vietnam. “This would not be the only time that Pham Xuan An got a scoop from Time long before the magazine’s readers back in the United States,” writes Bass. An saved the lives of several fellow journalists, though, including Robert Sam Anson. At the end of the war, he put his family on helicopters leaving Saigon for American ships offshore, then gladly greeted the Communist liberators—though he had to serve time in a reeducation camp simply for having been tainted by contact with the West.
Bass writes himself into the story too much, but the intriguing character of An provides the center of a fascinating account.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58648-409-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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