Book Review: The Women, by Hannah Kristin (2024)

 I just read Hannah Kristin's novel The Women. It is the story of a young nurse, less than a year out of nursing school, who enlists in the Army during the Vietnam War and spends two years working in evacuation hospitals in combat zones. The book is intended to illustrate the experiences of nurses during the war. It is a page-turner, and the author does an excellent job of showing the inner life of nurse Frances McGrath. 

PTSD afflicted nurses at the same rate as the male veterans.  Ten thousand women served in the military in Vietnam, and most were nurses. Their average was 23, and the average age of the soldiers they treated was 19.  Every day, six days a week, in-country, they worked 12-hour shifts, treating young American men whose limbs had been blown off, whose intestines were hanging out, or otherwise maimed horribly.  As if that were not enough, the Vietcong regularly attacked the hospitals and nurses' living quarters with rockets and mortar rounds.  

  

The public treated returning nurses the same way they treated returning soldiers.  They were not respected. No one wanted to know what they did, saw, or heard.  They were told to forget about it (as were the men). Parents assumed their daughters were the same naive and innocent persons who had left and expected them to resume their lives as if they had never been in the war. Most doctors, as well as the public, had never heard of PTSD.  Some civilians refused to believe that women served in the war.  And once people became aware of veterans with PTSD, because they served in hospitals and were not deployed in direct combat, many refused to believe that nurses could have PTSD.

For developing nursing skills, the quality of experience in a field hospital cannot be matched elsewhere. Nurses routinely performed many things only doctors did in the U.S.A. (e.g., tracheotomies and suturing patients after abdominal surgeries).  When they left the military, they were confident they could handle anything in the civilian world.

The book's historical and social background is accurate. It covers Frankie’s time in Vietnam and return to the U.S.A., which is equally important to understand.  I appreciated being reminded of the anti-war and civil rights movements and the other fashions, trends, and social changes from the 1960s.

The author did extensive background research before writing the book. Her purpose was to present the experiences of nurses in the war. She included examples of every kind of thing that happened to veterans during the period, but how many veterans experienced all of these things?  After Frankie returns to the U.S.A., some events are suspenseful and entertaining but excessive and overly dramatic. But overall, the book is a damn good read.

A Book Review: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), by Truman Capote

 On first impression, Holly Golightly seems shallow and scatterbrained.  While she says things that are sharp, intelligent, and full of life, they don’t seem to follow any expected or logical pattern.  She lives in a brownstone apartment in Manhattan, on East 70th Street by Lexington Avenue, and her main antagonist and foil is the unnamed first-person narrator who lives in the apartment above her. Capote presents an idyllic ambiance of 1940s New York–Tiffany’s, landmark hotels, spacious apartments, and upscale neighborhood bars with the characters speaking in the euphemisms and vernacular of the period.

Holly is 19 and comes from a broken family in Arkansas. At fourteen, she married a widower, a middle-aged veterinarian from Texas, but ran away.  The beautiful Holly connects with well-off or influential men from every walk of life, age, and country of origin, but she always does something to make them flee.  But even after condemning and rejecting her, some part of each man still loves her and will help her if needed. 

For a while, the narrator takes Holly and her antics at face value, that is, without judgment or emotional reaction, until he gets fed up, snaps, and decides she is “a crude exhibitionist, a time waster, an utter fake: someone never to be spoken to again.”  Of course, like all the others. When he eventually gets over it, he too realizes he loves her.

Holly dreams of marrying a wealthy man with whom she will have many children. In describing how she copes with romantic failures, she says:  “Well, when I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there.  If I could find a real-life place that'd make me feel like Tiffany's, then - then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name!”  

She knows or quickly learns who and what she does not want in life; however, she isn’t stable or unconflicted enough to constructively pursue what she does want.  Having been on her own since childhood has forced her to develop a creative wit and certain behaviors as survival skills, but the same behaviors ruin every relationship.

In the narrative, note the recurrence of the image of a cage.  To one suitor, she says:  “You mustn't give your heart to a wild thing. The more you do, the stronger they get, until they're strong enough to run into the woods or fly into a tree. And then to a higher tree and then to the sky.”   Despite being desired by wealthy or powerful men, Holly does not want to be put in a cage.  Near the end, one of her male acquaintances, the mobster Sally Tomato opines, “Yes, she was a phony but a real phony.”  She is real for sure but destined to repeat the same behaviors over and over again.  

Capote’s light and easy style, plus endearing imagery, made this an enjoyable read.   The novel is a character study supported by a great setting, storyline, and narrative voice.  Holly’s dialogue made it the perfect subject for the movie and stage adaptations. Knowing it was famous, I tried to watch the movie once but found it boring and couldn’t follow it. However, now that I have read the book, I will try it again. 

Reading Habits

 When I was a child, my mother did not allow me to have comic books.  I had neighborhood friends who read comic books. Their parents bought them or gave them the money to buy them.  Not my mother.  She did not consider them edifying. To her, they had no redeeming value.  I believe she inherited this attitude from my grandfather.  Yet my mother never applied the not-edifying rule to watching cartoons or Superman on TV. 

Just as inconsistent, despite the sanction on comic books, my father always enjoyed reading “the funny papers” that came with almost every newspaper.  (What was my mother going to say to my father!)  Every Sunday after Mass, my parents bought the Sunday editions of the New York Times and the New York Daily News. The New York Times never had “funny papers,”  but the Daily News did, and their Sunday edition had a whole section for comics that I looked forward to reading, as did my father.  They had Dick Tracey, Joe Palooka, Li’l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, and everything else on down.

Being deprived of the pleasures of comic books, I was also never allowed to read science fiction for similar reasons. More to the point, I never knew it existed.  When my grandfather and mother were growing up, science fiction was generally considered pulp, that is, junk fiction.  O.K.--I get that.  However, on one visit to my grandparents’ house, on their small bookshelf, I discovered a book called 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and a few other novels by Jules Verne. I sat on the living room rug and read 20,000 Leagues until it was time to go home. It was utterly fascinating.   

My grandfather also had a beautiful edition of Moby Dick, which I read cover-to-cover when I was 12.  He also had Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which is on my bucket list to read. My grandfather also subscribed to Reader’s Digest, which I devoured. They used to have a section called “It Pays To Increase Your Word Power,” a vocabulary quiz. I did all the vocabulary quizzes, but my grandfather always got a perfect score.  He also had Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe on his bookshelf, which I also read.

I was never introduced to the literary genre of fantasy. Again, I was unaware that it existed. Nevertheless, like the paradox of comic books vs the funny papers and TV cartoons, my mother would plop me down in front of the TV every year to watch The Wizard of Oz.   

In high school, we read some John Steinbeck and Nathaniel Hawthorne, not to mention Edgar Allen Poe, Saki, Jack London, etc.--the usual adolescent boy stuff.  As an adolescent, on my own, I read every book I could get by Herman Hesse.   I started with Beneath the Wheel, then Damien, then about half a dozen others. My favorite novel is Hesse’s Steppenwolf.  I tried re-reading some of Hesse’s books in midlife and found they no longer resonated with me.  Se la vie. You have to read him in adolescence.

At some point in my life, I heard of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.  I knew they were popular among young people during the time I was in college, as were the books of Carlos Castenada, but I never ventured to read them. I only discovered The Narnia Chronicles after my two sons were born.  When my children were old enough to read, I asked my mother why she had never introduced us to the stories of C.S. Lewis or J.R. Tolkien. She shrugged and said she didn’t know.  I interpreted that to mean she never had an inkling that they existed or were exceptional. (Sorry, I couldn’t help the pun!).

Years later, my mother and father did watch the movie adaptions of The Lord of the Rings.   My mother always expressed awe for the creativity of great books and movies, including the movie adaptions of The Lord of the Rings once they came out, as she did for The Wizard of Oz from decades prior.

Of course, I haphazardly read many other books (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance anyone?), including biographies and memoirs by various sports heroes (Instant Replay, for example), plus things like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.     

In my twenties, I read every book by Thomas Merton (a Trappist Monk) I could find. A gifted spiritual writer, he was and is inspirational.  His essays on social justice, about the social justice movements of the 1960s, are exceptional but a little dated now. 

As a young adult, I discovered Louis L’Amour, a wonderful and entertaining author famous for writing (well-researched!) pulp fiction novels about the Old West.  Moreover, in a college literature class, I was introduced to the hard-boiled detective novel, which was also once relegated to the pulp, that is, junk literature category.  Somewhere in my young adulthood, I read A Confederacy of Dunces (not pulp fiction!), a unique and under-appreciated book. 

Today, I read a lot of nonfiction, especially American History, biography, autobiography, select religious or philosophical books, and the Bible. I rarely read self-help books. I will read memoirs of pop/rock stars (like Testimony, by Robbie Robertson) and movie stars (Madonna).

I like any good fiction.  If I were to imagine someone suddenly asking me to name a novel I have read, I would say The Life of Pi, because it’s different. I like style,  imagery, and a good narrative.  I’ll try any author, but I still don’t read science fiction or fantasy.  I tried reading The Hobbit and found it boring. I love a good detective novel, police procedural, or spy novel. So-called post-modern literature requires too much mental calistenics.  I love early-American literature–Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  

I know there is a “Shit-ton” of excellent, literary women writers out there.  I just haven’t bothered to read any of them. I generally don’t read mid-listers.  I don’t bother reading horror, pure thrillers, or best-selling pot-boilers (Stephen King, James Patterson, John Grisham).  Though there are exceptions, they tend to be all form and no substance.  I prefer books with genuine human drama, existential dilemmas, exciting adventure, or unique writing style.  My grandfather would approve.