Washington Post Book World // Memoirs
A sheaf of tributes to memory's remarkable selectivity.
By Andrew Ervin
Sunday, May 15, 2005; BW10
Enemies Then, Colleagues Now
Wayne Karlin served as a helicopter gunner during the Vietnam War and for different reasons has returned to that country many times since, including in 2000 to work on a film. "Time always cracked and spilled odd bits and pieces of the past into the present whenever I traveled to Vietnam, as if I was violating a law of nature by going back," he writes in War Movies: Journeys To Vietnam: Scenes And Out-Takes (Curbstone; paperback, $15). "Returning seemed to link and magnetize some scatter of debris in my soul that drew charged, serendipitous situations and people to me like filings." The author of six well-regarded novels, Karlin is a natural storyteller, but his own story doesn't fit neatly into a single, linear narrative. In this memoir, divided into eight chapter-length "scenes," he has the good sense to cut back and forth in time. As his film crew recreates wartime events, he sees his past come back to life before his eyes. The formal structure he uses to describe this experience is brilliant: He integrates poetry, fiction and snippets of movie scripts, and the resulting collage mirrors the confusion he feels in making friends with and working among his former enemies -- women and men he might once have shot at.
War Movies differs from most Vietnam stories, including the usual Hollywood fare, because Karlin occasionally tries to write from the Vietnamese point of view -- demonstrating the war's effects on the locals and also casting himself among the enemy invaders. Instead of trying to forget his past, he embraces the horror of it, and he shares with his readers an unforgettable lesson about forgiveness.
From Panther to Writer
At age 17, Evans D. Hopkins left his staid, middle-class family to join the Black Panthers and begin a lifelong journey to find personal expression, by whatever means necessary, amid a culture of racial intolerance. His exciting new memoir, Life After Life: A Story of Rage and Redemption (Free Press, $25), details the story of his thoroughly examined path, focusing on his transition from "the quintessential angry young black male" to an incarcerated journalist -- an "unfree-lancer" -- and eventually a celebrated advocate of prisoners' rights.
Hopkins's story is part neo-slave narrative and part emancipation proclamation. "As a black child of the South in the 1960s," he writes, "I found the realities of race to be a bewildering blend of stereotypes and situations that tore at my psyche at every turn." Ironically, he didn't get sent to prison for his revolutionary activities with the Panthers but for a bungled bank heist. In jail, his writing career took off, and he found himself torn between his revolutionary ethic and his burgeoning artistic career, which began with an essay headlined, "Notes From a Prison Cell on the Coppola Execution," first published in this very newspaper in 1982.
Eventually Hopkins managed to channel his rage into more creative (if slightly less ambitious) pursuits than overthrowing the government. But if Life After Life is any indication, a fire still burns in his belly. Admirers of radical authors like Eldridge Cleaver, George L. Jackson, Norman Mailer and Frantz Fanon will feel right at home in Hopkins's company. The real legacy of the Black Panthers, this book seems to tell us, can be best witnessed in the fact that many of their once radical demands -- "land, bread, clothing, housing, and truth" -- now sound like common sense.
Great Numbers
Steven Church is so obsessed with The Guinness Book of World Records that he allows the dubious accomplishments of the many oddballs and eccentrics therein to be a guide to his own life. At times, it's difficult to tell if his unconventional The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record (Simon & Schuster, $23) is a postmodern mash-up of the Guinness mythos or merely the reflective rambling of a troubled man with way too much free time.
Church was a sickly child, prone to seizures and fever-induced hallucinations, which might explain why he identified with the record-book misfits. In a series of chapters like "Smashing, Bare Hand" and "Knives, Sharpest" and "Skin, Toughest" (each an extended riff on an old Guinness entry), he discusses in detail his envy of his younger, more outgoing brother and the tragedy that struck his Kansas family. (More than one person in his book dies "almost immediately.") Amid the devastation and low self-esteem, the obscure, often inane feats he read about give him some degree of comfort: "Okay, so my obsession is not with breaking records but with record holders, with people . More specifically, I'm obsessed with the people in my editions, 1980 and 1982, of the Guinness Book. They sort of moved into my psychic space when I was a kid and never left."
Church calls his memoir "creative nonfiction," but in the same paragraph, he tells us it's "not a book of fact." That contradictory quality makes The Guinness Book of Me difficult to pin down but also explains why it's so consistently engaging. Church directs his gaze inward but also simultaneously looks back into an equally complicated but more familiar former self. He evokes enough nostalgia to make his personal, sad story feel recognizable to just about all of us who grew up in the '70s.
Listening to the Voice of America
In 1980, bowing to intense international pressure, Fidel Castro finally allowed more than 125,000 dissidents and counterrevolutionaries to flee Cuba. The teenage Mirta Ojito was among them, as were any number of other so-called "undesirables" -- homosexuals, convicts, the mentally insane -- whom Castro wanted out of his hair. In Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus (Penguin Press, $24.95), Ojito, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, looks in depth at her experience in the Mariel boatlift and at its lasting political repercussions.
Ojito -- whose earliest memories are "not of making friends but of losing them to the United States" -- spent her childhood torn between her parents' refusal to accept the precepts of Castro's Cuba and the pressure from her teachers and classmates to conform to Communist Party ideology. "Surely none of my friends had fathers who listened to the Voice of America as mine did," she writes, "his ear pressed to the radio so the neighbors wouldn't hear the distinctive, official-sounding announcer." But her family wasn't alone in their desire to emigrate, and Ojito intersperses her own story with novelistic portraits of a few colorful characters responsible for launching the exodus to Florida, including a Miami disc jockey, a man who sought asylum by driving a bus through the gates of the Peruvian embassy, and, most memorable, a one-armed Vietnam vet whose humanitarian impulses sent him to Cuba to pick up refugees.
Those well-researched stories drive home the effects of that era's political climate on individual lives, and even on the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. The insight Ojito brings to bear, coupled with the crispness of her prose -- especially her detailed descriptions of diplomatic finagling -- make this memoir required reading for everyone interested in the history of post-Batista Cuba or of Cuban-American relations.
Losing My Religion
Considering that Martha Beck works as a professional "life coach" and a regular columnist for O magazine, I expected her Leaving the Saints (Crown, $24.95) to be yet another memoir of parapsychology, New Age kookiness and the blindingly obvious dressed up as deep, mystical truth. There's some of that, to be sure, but there's also genuine wisdom here -- albeit the kind certain to provoke controversy.
Subtitled "How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith," the book explains that Beck's religious misgivings began early, at a strange marriage ritual that involved pantomiming her own murder, which would occur "if we ever told certain temple secrets." Shortly afterward, an operating-table epiphany helped her recall what she alleges were submerged memories of being sexually abused by her father during another ritual.
And Beck's story gets even uglier and more complicated. Her father was a renowned Mormon author and historian (the New Yorker once called him "the most venerable scholar in Mormonism"). Seeking counseling in Utah would have meant publicly disparaging not only her father but also quite possibly the entire Mormon faith. She did so anyway and eventually decided that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was a "dynamic, charming, libidinous narcissist." So add a spiritual crisis to her already long list of problems.
Beck uses two separate narrative paths to keep us glued while she dishes the dirt. In one, she tells about the indignities she lived through in becoming a rare, feminist Mormon; in the other, she finally confronts her nonagenarian father in a hotel room. Through it all, and despite the memory -- real or imagined, we'll never know -- of being brutally victimized, Beck refuses to define herself merely as a victim. She writes that her ongoing "spiritual quest is like being in love; it's so passionate and adventurous that I'm always looking for someone to help me celebrate it." For 25 bucks, that special somebody could be you. ·
Andrew Ervin is a writer and critic in Champaign, Ill. He is a frequent contributor to Book World.
By Andrew Ervin
Sunday, May 15, 2005; BW10
Enemies Then, Colleagues Now
Wayne Karlin served as a helicopter gunner during the Vietnam War and for different reasons has returned to that country many times since, including in 2000 to work on a film. "Time always cracked and spilled odd bits and pieces of the past into the present whenever I traveled to Vietnam, as if I was violating a law of nature by going back," he writes in War Movies: Journeys To Vietnam: Scenes And Out-Takes (Curbstone; paperback, $15). "Returning seemed to link and magnetize some scatter of debris in my soul that drew charged, serendipitous situations and people to me like filings." The author of six well-regarded novels, Karlin is a natural storyteller, but his own story doesn't fit neatly into a single, linear narrative. In this memoir, divided into eight chapter-length "scenes," he has the good sense to cut back and forth in time. As his film crew recreates wartime events, he sees his past come back to life before his eyes. The formal structure he uses to describe this experience is brilliant: He integrates poetry, fiction and snippets of movie scripts, and the resulting collage mirrors the confusion he feels in making friends with and working among his former enemies -- women and men he might once have shot at.
War Movies differs from most Vietnam stories, including the usual Hollywood fare, because Karlin occasionally tries to write from the Vietnamese point of view -- demonstrating the war's effects on the locals and also casting himself among the enemy invaders. Instead of trying to forget his past, he embraces the horror of it, and he shares with his readers an unforgettable lesson about forgiveness.
From Panther to Writer
At age 17, Evans D. Hopkins left his staid, middle-class family to join the Black Panthers and begin a lifelong journey to find personal expression, by whatever means necessary, amid a culture of racial intolerance. His exciting new memoir, Life After Life: A Story of Rage and Redemption (Free Press, $25), details the story of his thoroughly examined path, focusing on his transition from "the quintessential angry young black male" to an incarcerated journalist -- an "unfree-lancer" -- and eventually a celebrated advocate of prisoners' rights.
Hopkins's story is part neo-slave narrative and part emancipation proclamation. "As a black child of the South in the 1960s," he writes, "I found the realities of race to be a bewildering blend of stereotypes and situations that tore at my psyche at every turn." Ironically, he didn't get sent to prison for his revolutionary activities with the Panthers but for a bungled bank heist. In jail, his writing career took off, and he found himself torn between his revolutionary ethic and his burgeoning artistic career, which began with an essay headlined, "Notes From a Prison Cell on the Coppola Execution," first published in this very newspaper in 1982.
Eventually Hopkins managed to channel his rage into more creative (if slightly less ambitious) pursuits than overthrowing the government. But if Life After Life is any indication, a fire still burns in his belly. Admirers of radical authors like Eldridge Cleaver, George L. Jackson, Norman Mailer and Frantz Fanon will feel right at home in Hopkins's company. The real legacy of the Black Panthers, this book seems to tell us, can be best witnessed in the fact that many of their once radical demands -- "land, bread, clothing, housing, and truth" -- now sound like common sense.
Great Numbers
Steven Church is so obsessed with The Guinness Book of World Records that he allows the dubious accomplishments of the many oddballs and eccentrics therein to be a guide to his own life. At times, it's difficult to tell if his unconventional The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record (Simon & Schuster, $23) is a postmodern mash-up of the Guinness mythos or merely the reflective rambling of a troubled man with way too much free time.
Church was a sickly child, prone to seizures and fever-induced hallucinations, which might explain why he identified with the record-book misfits. In a series of chapters like "Smashing, Bare Hand" and "Knives, Sharpest" and "Skin, Toughest" (each an extended riff on an old Guinness entry), he discusses in detail his envy of his younger, more outgoing brother and the tragedy that struck his Kansas family. (More than one person in his book dies "almost immediately.") Amid the devastation and low self-esteem, the obscure, often inane feats he read about give him some degree of comfort: "Okay, so my obsession is not with breaking records but with record holders, with people . More specifically, I'm obsessed with the people in my editions, 1980 and 1982, of the Guinness Book. They sort of moved into my psychic space when I was a kid and never left."
Church calls his memoir "creative nonfiction," but in the same paragraph, he tells us it's "not a book of fact." That contradictory quality makes The Guinness Book of Me difficult to pin down but also explains why it's so consistently engaging. Church directs his gaze inward but also simultaneously looks back into an equally complicated but more familiar former self. He evokes enough nostalgia to make his personal, sad story feel recognizable to just about all of us who grew up in the '70s.
Listening to the Voice of America
In 1980, bowing to intense international pressure, Fidel Castro finally allowed more than 125,000 dissidents and counterrevolutionaries to flee Cuba. The teenage Mirta Ojito was among them, as were any number of other so-called "undesirables" -- homosexuals, convicts, the mentally insane -- whom Castro wanted out of his hair. In Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus (Penguin Press, $24.95), Ojito, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, looks in depth at her experience in the Mariel boatlift and at its lasting political repercussions.
Ojito -- whose earliest memories are "not of making friends but of losing them to the United States" -- spent her childhood torn between her parents' refusal to accept the precepts of Castro's Cuba and the pressure from her teachers and classmates to conform to Communist Party ideology. "Surely none of my friends had fathers who listened to the Voice of America as mine did," she writes, "his ear pressed to the radio so the neighbors wouldn't hear the distinctive, official-sounding announcer." But her family wasn't alone in their desire to emigrate, and Ojito intersperses her own story with novelistic portraits of a few colorful characters responsible for launching the exodus to Florida, including a Miami disc jockey, a man who sought asylum by driving a bus through the gates of the Peruvian embassy, and, most memorable, a one-armed Vietnam vet whose humanitarian impulses sent him to Cuba to pick up refugees.
Those well-researched stories drive home the effects of that era's political climate on individual lives, and even on the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. The insight Ojito brings to bear, coupled with the crispness of her prose -- especially her detailed descriptions of diplomatic finagling -- make this memoir required reading for everyone interested in the history of post-Batista Cuba or of Cuban-American relations.
Losing My Religion
Considering that Martha Beck works as a professional "life coach" and a regular columnist for O magazine, I expected her Leaving the Saints (Crown, $24.95) to be yet another memoir of parapsychology, New Age kookiness and the blindingly obvious dressed up as deep, mystical truth. There's some of that, to be sure, but there's also genuine wisdom here -- albeit the kind certain to provoke controversy.
Subtitled "How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith," the book explains that Beck's religious misgivings began early, at a strange marriage ritual that involved pantomiming her own murder, which would occur "if we ever told certain temple secrets." Shortly afterward, an operating-table epiphany helped her recall what she alleges were submerged memories of being sexually abused by her father during another ritual.
And Beck's story gets even uglier and more complicated. Her father was a renowned Mormon author and historian (the New Yorker once called him "the most venerable scholar in Mormonism"). Seeking counseling in Utah would have meant publicly disparaging not only her father but also quite possibly the entire Mormon faith. She did so anyway and eventually decided that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was a "dynamic, charming, libidinous narcissist." So add a spiritual crisis to her already long list of problems.
Beck uses two separate narrative paths to keep us glued while she dishes the dirt. In one, she tells about the indignities she lived through in becoming a rare, feminist Mormon; in the other, she finally confronts her nonagenarian father in a hotel room. Through it all, and despite the memory -- real or imagined, we'll never know -- of being brutally victimized, Beck refuses to define herself merely as a victim. She writes that her ongoing "spiritual quest is like being in love; it's so passionate and adventurous that I'm always looking for someone to help me celebrate it." For 25 bucks, that special somebody could be you. ·
Andrew Ervin is a writer and critic in Champaign, Ill. He is a frequent contributor to Book World.
posted by Andrew Ervin at
5/15/2005
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