A Dangerous Country: An American Elegy
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Ron Kovic, author of Born on the Fourth of July and one of the country's most powerful and passionate antiwar voices, completes his Vietnam Trilogy with this poignant, inspiring, and deeply personal elegy to America.
WHEN EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD RON KOVIC enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 1964, he couldn’t foresee that he would return from Vietnam paralyzed and in a wheelchair for life. His best-selling 1976 memoir Born on the Fourth of July became an antiwar classic and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Tom Cruise as Kovic. His follow-up, Hurricane Street, chronicled his advocacy for Vietnam veterans’ rights. A Dangerous Country: An American Elegy completes Kovic’s Vietnam Trilogy, delving deep into his long and often agonizing journey home from war and eventual healing, forgiveness, and spiritual redemption.
The book opens with Kovic’s never-before-revealed Vietnam diary (July 7, 1967–July 26, 1968). His entries from this period portray a patriotic young soldier with a strong moral and religious conscience. Kovic then recalls his political awakening after his return from Vietnam confined to a wheelchair following his horrific injury. He also chronicles the tremendous guilt he feels over his accidental killing of a fellow Marine while on patrol. This killing psychologically torments him as much as his severe disability.
After years of social, political, and sexual turmoil—and on the brink of suicide—Kovic experiences a powerful epiphany that gives him a reason and purpose to live; a renewed faith and strength to carry on. Although his trauma is severe, his third memoir is ultimately the inspirational story of a survivor finding a way to rise above his depression and despair, forgiving his enemies and himself, and growing deeply committed to a new life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Born on the Fourth of July author Kovic returns to his traumatic experiences during the Vietnam War for this searing memoir. The first section consists of entries from a previously unpublished diary Kovic kept during his deployment. In them, he traces his dawning moral objection to the war and his struggles to overcome the guilt and pain it caused him. Early entries about afternoons just before deployment spent watching The Dirty Dozen quickly give way to harrowing accounts of Kovic's unit shooting Vietnamese women and children by mistake, and the author's own accidental killing of a colleague whom he mistook for the enemy. The diary entries are followed by more straightforward memoir sections that catalog Kovic's efforts to rebuild his life when he returned to the U.S., paralyzed from the waist down and tormented by depression and suicidal thoughts. Ultimately, he came to regard his paralyzed body as both "a living reminder of the war" and something that enabled him to become "a messenger, a living symbol, a man who learned to embrace all men and women as my brothers and sisters." While Kovic covers familiar territory, he does so with immediacy and bracing candor. Even those acquainted with the author's story will find this fascinating.
