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Title: Hard, soft, tender, brutal
Review: Bruce Weigle spent the last year of his childhood, and the first year as an adult in Vietnam during the war: it was the same year. I wouldn't say his childhood up til then was all bucolic bliss, and his first years after returning to the States were certainly stained with his experiences in the "green war" as he calls it. This is a memoir of a working class youth- with all the roughness around it. What sets it apart is it's also the memoir of a man who went on to become one of America's great poets, a man still able to cultivate love and tenderness. Weigle comes full spiral to a place where he becomes a translator of Vietnamese, and with his wife adopts a young Vietnamese girl- a tale in itself as compelling as the childhood and the war. This is a book that reaches into our own dark places, but also shows us a way out.
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