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Summer Reads: From NC to TX to Vietnam!


I can't believe it took me these many years to read Cold Mountain.  I think I was put off it because of the movie, which I did see when it first came out.  I remember being haunted by the scene in which Natalie Portman has to leave her crying baby on the ground at the demand of the search parties looking for outliers.  I didn't want to read the book after I saw the movie because, frankly, I didn't like it so much.  I'm thinking now that the movie was all wrong because for one its casting was terrible (Nicole Kidman and Jude Law) and it focused too much on the love story.  The book, luckily, focuses more on survival of the Civil War both by the men fighting it and the people trying to live through it.  It really gives you something to think about when you realize so many of the men that were fighting in the war that had no belief in it whatsoever, and if that's the case, how easy it would be to walk away from it.  I also remember at the time that a lot of people in North Carolina were offended that the film wasn't shot here when so much of the setting is in its mountains.  As I read this book, all I could see in my head was the brush and the dirt and the streams of my home state.  No foreign camera shots to mess that up!  The book truly is beautiful in its story of resilience, friendship, reckoning and yes, love.  With all the books and movies that glorify and romanticize war, in any decade or time period, this one gives a bit more the gritty and ugly picture.  And also makes you stop and think about those folks who re-enact the battles......should they really be doing that?

I heard Domingo Martinez discuss his memoir on NPR several months ago and was immediately intrigued. This guy gives you the straight dope on growing up in the border town of Brownsville, Texas in the 70's and 80's and what it meant to be a boy being raised to be a man......quickly.  Martinez doesn't hold back in describing his tough father and even tougher grandmother and how it was pretty much impossible to grow up there and be a boy that was sensitive or, gasp, didn't want to play football!  I didn't really identify with his story, but I did appreciate the way he pieced his childhood experiences together in order to make for a better adulthood.  That realization I did understand.  This guy really put it all out there, and by the end of  the book I had so much love and respect for him.  And even though I don't know him and will probably never meet him, I'm really rooting for him!

I also read this memoir by a man who lives in South Carolina.  I've always been intrigued by the Vietnam War as it was the war fought by men my father's age.  And I've always been glad my dad wasn't there as I've seen the misery and hurt that those vets have carried for decades now.  I'm not really in love with this book because this guy just isn't a very good storyteller.  The book reads more like a travel log which may be exactly what other readers want out of a Vietnam memoir.  I had a hard time with it due to that but also I just didn't find this guy very likeable.  I know he's just trying to tell his story from his time there, but he comes across like a know-it-all who found every other officer in the Army to be a dumbass.  I've never been in the service and obviously never been in war, so his opinion is worth more than mine.  However, I think I will seek out another biography on this subject for a broader picture.

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