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Article: James Carroll's haunting memoir
- Article from:
- Chicago Sun-Times
- Article date:
- June 16, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1996 Chicago Sun-Times. (Hide copyright information)
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In this job I read a lot of books, some of which are moving and some
provocative. Few have both moved and provoked me as much as novelist
James Carroll's memoir of the Vietnam era.
In February, 1969, Carroll was a newly ordained Paulist priest,
and in his first sermon before family and friends he used the loaded
word "napalm." His father reacted as if slapped. Lt. Gen. Joseph
Carroll was the man who picked the bombing targets in Lyndon
Johnson's air war over Vietnam.
That irreparable breach marks the beginning and the end of An
American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us
(Houghton Mifflin, $27.95). This is a brief (276 pages) but
astonishingly meaty book, one of ...