Big-picture politics take second place to the achingly personal in Bissell’s heartfelt book.
A penetrating look back at the Vietnam conflict, with Bissell (Chasing the Sea, 2003, etc.) alternately guiding and following his veteran father.
It took Bissell a little doing to convince his father to travel with him to Vietnam in 2003. A Marine junior officer who served in-country in 1966, before things turned definitively bad, the elder Bissell rides with a few ghosts. His son worries that, like so many veterans, he is haunted by failure. “You sought to counter an insurgency and wound up activating a larger insurgency,” the author writes in a passage he would never have addressed directly to Dad, voicing worries that run strong today. Father and son travel to Hue, My Lai, Chu Lai, Saigon and other key locations of the war, making discoveries about the past and about each other. Along the way, Bissell delivers a riveting, you-are-there account of the fall of Saigon—not just the dust-kicking helicopters and hands poking through embassy gates, but the behind-the-scenes activities of the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger, worried then, as always, about his image. He had to be reassured that the North Vietnamese would permit the evacuation of American citizens and would not use this embarrassing retreat as a propaganda tool. “In those final words stands the colossal folly of the Vietnam War,” Bissell unsparingly concludes. “The most powerful nation in the world, hotfooting it out of one of the poorest, being assured that no one intends to ‘damage’ its reputation.”
Big-picture politics take second place to the achingly personal in Bissell’s heartfelt book.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-42265-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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