A metaphor-heavy, intelligently crafted memoir focusing on the author's life-altering Vietnam War experiences. Tripp (a writer and film producer) spent a year as a US Army First Infantry Division lieutenant in Vietnam in 196869. Tripp tells his Vietnam story exceptionally well, intimately detailing the physical and emotional landscapes he traversed in the war zone. What he experienced, in the main, was death, brutality, betrayal, and searing emotional trauma. Tripp recreates his psyche-scarring experiences in a bluntly self-critical manner, referring often to his terrors, self-doubts, failures, and emotional crises. He also expresses deep anger—``an anger that was so great that it took years and years to dissipate''—and bitterness about the American war in Vietnam. ``There was nothing heroic here,'' Tripp says, ``we were being pushed by old men with self-serving ideas, pushed to the brink of death just to glorify old men.'' Tripp's account of what happened to him in Vietnam is a noteworthy accomplishment. But his book is more than a war memoir; Tripp weaves in the themes of his life before, during, and after Vietnam. The main theme is Tripp's turbulent relationship with his father, a deeply troubled man who left his family when the author was a baby and with whom Tripp, as an adult, attempted reconciliation. Tripp refers often to his father's WW II experiences, their tempestuous interactions, and their shared love of the sea. Tripp's other themes are manhood, leadership, mental illness, his own experiences of fatherhood, and his love for the outdoors. In a narrative filled with densely packed prose—and, thankfully, without reconstructed dialogue— Tripp tells an amazing story, and tells it creatively, intelligently, and effectively. A cautionary, antiheroic tale of war and manhood.
Pub Date: Feb. 5, 1997
ISBN: 1-883642-14-0
Page Count: 261
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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
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
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