An American Requiem : God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us

Rating:
Summary: powerful and evocative
Review: As a reader in my early twenties, until I read this memoir it was difficult for me to understand the enormity that was the Vietnam War to American consciousness. The power of the book is two-fold. The first is the picture Carroll paints of his family -- a distinctly American creation with which most readers can identify, especially those like myself who had a military upbringing. The second is the historic moment in which Carroll's emotional story unfolds. Until this book, I never truly felt what a blow the Vietnam War was to many Americans' faith in their country. The pathos in the story lies in the fact that while Carroll finds himself politically and ideologically in the tumultuous era of the 70's, he simultaneously alienates himself from his beloved father and the values the older man embodies. Some readers may think that the memoir is overly sentimental, yet the sincerity and introspection with which Carroll writes makes the emotions in the book more evocative than the more tired tear-jerkers out there. The complex emotions of love and regret are expressed beautifully by the close of the book. One of the most emotionally evocative books I've read in a long time and also an informative glimpse into a period of American history.

Rating:
Summary: powerful and evocative
Review: As a reader in my early twenties, until I read this memoir it was difficult for me to understand the enormity that was the Vietnam War to American consciousness. The power of the book is two-fold. The first is the picture Carroll paints of his family -- a distinctly American creation with which most readers can identify, especially those like myself who had a military upbringing. The second is the historic moment in which Carroll's emotional story unfolds. Until this book, I never truly felt what a blow the Vietnam War was to many Americans' faith in their country. The pathos in the story lies in the fact that while Carroll finds himself politically and ideologically in the tumultuous era of the 70's, he simultaneously alienates himself from his beloved father and the values the older man embodies. Some readers may think that the memoir is overly sentimental, yet the sincerity and introspection with which Carroll writes makes the emotions in the book more evocative than the more tired tear-jerkers out there. The complex emotions of love and regret are expressed beautifully by the close of the book. One of the most emotionally evocative books I've read in a long time and also an informative glimpse into a period of American history.

Rating:
Summary: The negative reviewers have misread the book
Review: I must say I cried when I read this story. I to am of Carroll descent and I long wondered the drive and motivation behind our family. I don't know if it was a carry over from the days of Irish kingship, to Charles Carroll of Maryland or his son, PRINCES OF IRELAND, PLANTERS OF MARYLAND, A CARROLL SAGA by Hoffman recently released. Of course I cried about that one too. I cried for my Mother, the last of the Carroll's in her line, who would have loved to have seen all this in print. Jim Carroll, you are a hero to me for telling the truth as bad as it hurts, for the impact of vietnam affected all us, the children and yet we live to tell. Certainly you are part of the destiny your Father knew was ours. Keep writing and I will keep reading, and I will always be grateful for your story that eased my pain.

Rating:
Summary: Of course it's one-sided!
Review: I was so surprised by reading the few negative reviews of this book that I felt obligated to comment. Yes, his story is one-sided, and no, he doesn't explore his father's perspective much, or what the proponents of war were really thinking. And yes, he obviously feels that he was in the right to protest the war.

But this isn't a book about his father, the Catholic Church, and especially not about the Vietnam war. This is simply the story of his life, as he presents it. Like the best of books, you root for the protagonist, you sympathize with him, and sometimes you wish he had done things differently. It is a fascinating, absorbing read and a good glimpse into the spirit of a time that I am too young to know myself. It's also an odd juxtaposition with the current events of our nation at war.

Rating:
Summary: Of course it's one-sided!
Review: I was so surprised by reading the few negative reviews of this book that I felt obligated to comment. Yes, his story is one-sided, and no, he doesn't explore his father's perspective much, or what the proponents of war were really thinking. And yes, he obviously feels that he was in the right to protest the war.

But this isn't a book about his father, the Catholic Church, and especially not about the Vietnam war. This is simply the story of his life, as he presents it. Like the best of books, you root for the protagonist, you sympathize with him, and sometimes you wish he had done things differently. It is a fascinating, absorbing read and a good glimpse into the spirit of a time that I am too young to know myself. It's also an odd juxtaposition with the current events of our nation at war.

Rating:
Summary: About Vietnam?
Review: I was subjected to this book as part of a reading regimen on the Vietnam War. I find that odd, since, despite the title, Vietnam seems to play very little part in Carroll's narrative. This book is about a man grappling with his faith and with his father, the only two subjects that he really engages in this book. His treatment of the Vietnam War is restricted to his platitudes about its evils and recountings of activities performed. Carroll never really engages the war in any meaningful way, just like he as a person never really engaged his priesthood. The War was treated as a backdrop for the narrative, but it should never be described as a book about Vietnam.

Rating:
Summary: Well worth reading, if
Review: If you really want to know about one family's experience with the Vietnam War.Well worth reading if you are a son.Well worth reading if you are a father.I first heard of James Carroll in my adult Sunday School discussion class, and wanted to know more of his thoughts. I chose this as my first book of his. I am glad I did!I was alive, though very young, during the United States' involvement in Vietnam, and had just a child's view. A pacifist child's view, but a child's view.(and yes, as a life (so far!) resident of Kent, Ohio, I experienced a certain amount of protest, including May, 1970.)An American Requiem filled in gaps, and has sparked my thinking and will direct my future reading.James Carroll tried to reconcile with his father, at least, that's how I read this fine, gripping book.Not all parents are always right, and not all children are always wrong.He included a small selection of interesting (mostly family) photographs.I consider my time reading An American Requiem to be time well spent.If it matters at all, I am not a Catholic (I belong to the United Church of Christ,) but find the Roman Catholic Church to be worthy of study and reflection.I hope to eventually meet James Carroll, and would really like to talk about Dads, Sons, and men with him.

Rating:
Summary: ...
Review: Mr. Carroll has written an interesting book. I read this book in a matter of days, a sure sign it never got boring. I disagreed with Mr. Carroll constantly, but still give the book a high rating. I came away from the book finding Mr. Carroll to be phony. A man rebelling against an overbearing father by entering the Priesthood, a vocation he was completely unfit for. He showed no respect for his vocation at the seminary where he and his fellow seminarians cursed their directors and teachers. He was ordained and became a professional protester, I don't recall him performing many priestly duties, but he sure did a lot of protesting against the Vietnam War. He did seem to realize he wasn't Priestly material soon after the war ended. I find it amazing how many seminarians and young Priests seemed to lose their Priestly vocation after the war ended and they were in no danger of being drafted. I did find his father to be overbearing and abrasive at times, but it always seemed that his father was the one reaching out to reconcile with his son. Mr. Carroll is always right and dear ole dad is always wrong, I think he should have evaluated himself and looked more closely at his father's points of view before writing this book. It must feel good knowing you have never been wrong.

Rating:
Summary: About Vietnam?
Review: One of the worst qualities of the Baby-Boom generation is their propensity to view their own personal concerns and desires as if they were universal moral imperatives. The most notorious example of this was their opposition to the Vietnam War, during which they turned a perfectly typical lack of enthusiasm for warfare on the part of those who will actually have to do the fighting, into a sweeping judgment that the war was itself immoral.

This annoying trait has never been put on more ostentatious display than here in James Carroll's memoir about his tortured relationship with his father during the war years. Joe Carroll, who had quit the seminary just before his ordination as a priest, went on to become a lawyer, an FBI agent, an Air Force General, and the first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Having judged himself unworthy to be a priest, he and his devout wife Mary placed their hopes in their sons, with James, after his older brother Joe contracted polio, becoming the natural choice to become a priest. James did go through the motions of joining the priesthood, though it's never clear from his narrative that he held any genuine religious beliefs, but as he became increasingly involved in the Catholic Left anti-War movement of the 60's & 70's, he eventually quit the Church. He has since become a bestselling novelist, a Boston Globe columnist, written this prize-winning memoir and has just written Constantine's Sword, a "historical" account of anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church (see Orrin's review).

These are the bare bones of the story and they suggest a young man whose opposition to the immorality of the Vietnam War causes a crisis of faith. In point of fact, the War seems to have had little to do with Carroll's personal crisis, certainly its morality had nothing to do with it, instead the story he has to tell is that age old tale of youth rebelling against authority. I'm loathe to engage in psychoanalysis, being both unqualified and not much of a believer in its efficacy, but Carroll uses the term Oedipal so often and the book is cast so clearly in the form of an Oedipal drama that it's hard to avoid doing so. Start with the fact that he outdoes his father by actually becoming a priest, where Joe fell short; continue with the way that this profession figuratively wed him to his pious mother, whose entry to Heaven would be virtually guaranteed by virtue of having borne a priest; move along to his utter rejection of his father's profession and an eventual adoption of complete pacifism; then conclude with his decision to leave the priesthood after his father had been forced out of government and crippled by disease. It's hard to see how Vietnam actually matters to any of this psychodrama : had his Dad been a butcher, Carroll would have become a vegetarian, had he been a fireman, Carroll would have been an arsonist. This is a mere story of generational tension dressed up in the ennobling guise of a great moral struggle.

The most revealing aspect of Carroll's self-portrait and the account of the moral dilemma he supposedly faced as a result of the War is his complete failure to consider the consequences of peace on the Vietnamese people. His opposition to the War, as he himself depicts it, is almost exclusively a function of the fact that he's made uncomfortable by the means that were being used to conduct it. There is not a single word of consideration here of what would, and did, happen to the people of Vietnam once America withdrew. The moral calculus at work seems to be that it is better that Vietnam be destroyed by Communism than that a single American have to commit an act which will trouble his conscience. That is a perfectly honorable argument to make, and a necessary corollary of pacifism.

Even this shortcoming would not be so bad were it not for the impact it has on the rest of the book. But one result of his failure to treat this issue is that he ignores what was certainly a central motivation of Cold Warriors like his father. They certainly prosecuted the War because they had considered the consequences of not doing so and found these consequences unacceptable. While it is possible, perhaps even accurate, to argue that they were wrong in their determination, simple fairness requires that Carroll give them their due and look at their legitimate motivations. Deprived, by the author, of the beliefs that drove them, they are presented as one-dimensional characters whose sole purpose is to stand as convenient villains in Carroll's little morality play.

At one point in the book Carroll places the "blame" for American involvement in Vietnam on the Catholic Church and the advocacy for intervention of folks like Cardinal Spellman. Though delusional, this assertion is of a piece with his blaming the Holocaust on the Catholic Church, as he does in the aforementioned Constantine's Sword. One has, first of all, to be troubled by a man who attributes such power to an institution which after all represents a minority of the citizens of Germany and the United States and which has proven incapable of influencing those nations on such issues as birth control, and the like. Secondly, one can't help noticing that there's an element here of reenacting the Oedipal drama with his biological father, his rebellion now directed towards the figurative father, the Church, perhaps even God. The cumulative effect of these two books is to suggest that the greater problem lies not in the sins, real or imagined, of Joe Carroll and the Catholic Church but in the psychological conflicts of James Carroll.

Finally, Carroll claims to have arrived at the viewpoint that war is always unjust. How then would he square his concern over the Holocaust with this position ? He makes much over his obsession with the threat of nuclear war : but if we'd had the bomb in the late 30's or early 40's, or better yet, if Churchill had it, would Carroll really oppose dropping it on Hitler and the high command of the Nazi Party, no matter how many innocent civilian lives it would have claimed ? Would he really be unwilling to sacrifice 30,000 or 40,000 or however many in order to save the tens of millions who ended up dying during the War ? For an author who writes with such smug self-certainty about the purity of his own moral vision, and who is so eager to judge the moral failings of others, he somehow manages to avoid the really hard questions that his newfound philosophy raises. For all that these books are about the author himself, they ultimately reflect fairly little deliberation over the ramifications of the moral choices that he's made.

Which brings us to the final legacy of the Baby-Boom generation. They have succeeded brilliantly in rebellion, in rejecting the institutions, the morals, and the beliefs of their parents and the other generations that came before them. The problem they have left behind is what should replace the Judeo-Christian culture which they've done their best to destroy. Perhaps in this sense James Carroll's book is a signal text for his generation : just as he speaks eloquently about rejecting the faith of his fathers but falls silent about what has replaced it, his generation stands amidst the rubble they have created and have no idea what to erect in its place.

GRADE : D-

Rating:
Summary: The Catholic Church, Vietnam and coming of age
Review: This is an honest, soul-searching book about a man who questions his faith and his father's role in the Vietnam War. Rather than taking a "moral high ground," like one of the earlier reviewers claimed, I found Carroll's writing to be very humble and self-effacing. He readily admits to "standing in the background" on many of the early protests.

Although Carroll's questioning of religious AND military apologists will no doubt raise the ire of dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, his perspective is a breath of fresh air to those of us with moral questions of our own.