An absorbing evocation of the Vietnam experience, full of mordant reflections and searing visuals.
The Vietnam War’s drudgery, horror, and occasional humanity come through in Clevenger’s memoir and photo portfolio.
The author spent most of 1968 in Vietnam as an infantryman and combat photographer in the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division, and his recollections paint a fraught portrait of boredom, tension, and terror. He spent much time slogging through rice paddies infested with ants, leeches, and pythons; crawled into tunnels in search of Viet Cong guerillas, an ordeal that still inspired nightmares 50 years later; and survived firefights with the help of dumb luck. (He suffered a minor hand wound from a shell-burst while peering through his camera—which blocked the shrapnel from taking out his eye.) The book also has high drama: Clevenger had to threaten to shoot a fellow soldier to prevent him from raping a Vietnamese girl, witnessed a stewardess on his flight to Vietnam break down weeping at the thought of ferrying men to their deaths, and turned to faith to weather his predicament. Clevenger’s prose is clear-eyed, down-to-earth, and full of arresting detail in moments of crisis: “The gunfire paused, and Jerry was the first to rise. Fire cracked again, and Jerry dropped…‘It’s only a scratch,’ I told him as blood soaked the dressing and covered my hands.” The author’s black-and-white war photos tell their own riveting stories. In them, Vietnam is a vista of lush paddies as seen from a Huey—but on the ground it’s a sucking morass (in one picture, a soldier struggles to keep his head above the mud engulfing his body) or, often, a dreary stubble razed by napalm and Agent Orange. Soldiers appear poignantly young, at ease with their lethal gear, sometimes relaxed, sometimes raddled with adrenaline or exhaustion. Clevenger’s combat photos are intense and immediate: One spotlights a soldier frozen amid a blur of water churned up by enemy bullets. The result is a vivid, emotionally powerful re-creation of war’s reality.
An absorbing evocation of the Vietnam experience, full of mordant reflections and searing visuals.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781956200027
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Babel Editions
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
