Sunday, April 14, 2013

Fortnightly Book, April 14

Roger Hugh Charles Donlon was the first Vietnam War veteran to receive the Medal of Honor, and the first member of special forces to do so; Donlon's citation makes for interesting reading. This brings us to the next Fortnightly Book, which is called Outpost of Freedom and tells Donlon's story.

This is an as-told-to book, written by Warren Rogers, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning political reporter best known for his biography of Robert Kennedy, with whom he was friends (and who provides a foreword for this book). One of Rogers's Pulitzers was for reporting on Green Beret activities in Vietnam, and he had been a Marine in WWII, so he was eminently suitable for this sort of collaborative not-quite-ghostwriting memoir in which he tells another person's story from that person's point of view.

The book seems to have become quite successful. It's nonfiction, but like most of the military-themed fiction in my library, this one was originally part of my grandfather's library.

The major reasons I'm reading it is that, given how busy I've been lately, I could use a book on the shorter and easier side, and I've been doing other military-themed reading recently. But it does have fairly good reviews.