... loving but brutally honest ... gives readers a vivid, front-row view of the divisiveness in one very prominent family, and through that family, a view of the national divisiveness that continued long after the Vietnam War.
... staggering ... There is an awkward, halting quality to Craig McNamara’s prose, which gives it credibility and power. Craig seemed to live much of his life in a state of shock. Terrible things happened to him, and, over and over again, he can’t remember his reaction.
... a valiant and abrasive attempt to sift through a legacy his father refused to abjure. If Camelot really was a kind of court of midcentury kings, a high watermark for liberal capitalism distant from our moment of fracture, how fortunate we are to have such a thoughtful account of that world from someone who was born into it. Unlike many memoirs from this milieu and journalistic treatments of it, Craig McNamara’s book evinces the sort of hippie humanity that his dad, in his own way, worked to squash ... You can tell Craig McNamara means business because he directly links his formative experiences with geopolitical explosions, the elite class of U.S. bureaucrats reacting to them, and how these encounters might connect to the lives of their children ... a captivating text for anyone grappling with the pain of possessing a parent who did horrible things. It is also a charming account of a long-since-dead international liberal aristo-bureaucracy. That a son published such a loving denunciation of his father is fairly astonishing.
... a stunning, deeply personal look at his life as the son of the prime shaper of America’s Vietnam War policy, secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara. In searing detail, the younger McNamara reveals reams of hitherto unreported details about his controversial father’s family life and how the elder McNamara’s lies and obfuscations about the war led to their estrangement ... Offering a complex, introspective look at how his relationship with his father turned into 'a mixture of love and rage,' the author sheds light on an entire generation’s disillusionment with their forebears and reaches a depth of understanding about Robert S. McNamara that no previous book about his role in the Vietnam War has achieved. This is a must-read.
Chile. Writing this memoir is clearly a cathartic exercise for McNamara, who decries his father’s 'misleading statements' and 'inadequate apologies' ... this memoir, though readable, sheds only a little light on the matter ... A footnote to history, of some interest to students of the Cold War and its hot theaters.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
