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Summary
Summary
Seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, just out of his Harlem high school, enlists in the Army in the summer of 1967 and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam.
Author Notes
Walter Dean Myers was born on August 12, 1937 in Martinsberg, West Virginia. When he was three years old, his mother died and his father sent him to live with Herbert and Florence Dean in Harlem, New York. He began writing stories while in his teens. He dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Army at the age of 17. After completing his army service, he took a construction job and continued to write.
He entered and won a 1969 contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children, which led to the publication of his first book, Where Does the Day Go? During his lifetime, he wrote more than 100 fiction and nonfiction books for children and young adults. His works include Fallen Angels, Bad Boy, Darius and Twig, Scorpions, Lockdown, Sunrise Over Fallujah, Invasion, Juba!, and On a Clear Day. He also collaborated with his son Christopher, an artist, on a number of picture books for young readers including We Are America: A Tribute from the Heart and Harlem, which received a Caldecott Honor Award, as well as the teen novel Autobiography of My Dead Brother.
He was the winner of the first-ever Michael L. Printz Award for Monster, the first recipient of the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement, and a recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults. He also won the Coretta Scott King Award for African American authors five times. He died on July 1, 2014, following a brief illness, at the age of 76.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
The powerful story of an introspective Harlem youth who is sent to fight in Vietnam. With dreams of college fading, Ritchie Perry (17) enlists, buying time to consider his future. By mistake, he's ordered to Southeast Asia and into a bloody, violent nightmare where he sees his fellows gunned down (sometimes by their own side), women and children mutilated and killed, desperate heroism and equally desperate cowardice; his articulate, dispassionate telling only accentuates his story's horror, Myers masterfully re-creates the combat zone with its "hours of boredom, seconds of terror," its crushing tension and the distortion of values brought on by the relentless proximity of death--Ritchie says, "We were in the middle of it, and it was deeply within us." He survives racist officers, pitched battles, guerrilla raids, and multiple wounds--not all of them physical; whether his numbed spirit will eventually thaw is a question the author leaves open. War-story fans will find enough action here, though it isn't glorified; thoughtful readers will be haunted by this tribute to a ravaged generation. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* We're all dead over here. . . . We're all dead and just hoping we come back to life. Though the words belong to black, 17-year-old Richie Perry, they merely echo the thoughts of all the characters in this gut-twisting Vietnam War novel that breaks uncharted ground in teenage fiction. With the papers full of peace talks and money scarce at home, Richie, like others he would come to know, enlists more to postpone a dead-end life in Harlem than to defend his country. He does not really understand what awaits him overseas--a war that will rip away his youth and test his sanity, while it forges bonds of friendship and love unlike any he has ever known. Myers does an outstanding job of re-creating the theater of war--from the tedium that breeds violence and vicious words among American comrades (black against white, black against black, white against white, and man against man), to the sudden shock, the pain, the confusion, and the stark terror that brings soliders face-to-face with their ideals, their religious beliefs, and their morality in a world where a mother turns her child into a human bomb, an officer sends men into combat only to reap honors for himself. Social and political concerns related to the conflict blend smoothly into the plot: American antiwar sentiment, draft dodgers, drug abuse among servicemen, and the role of the media all concern Perry and his friends. Plot tension expertly reflects the extreme conditions of the battlefield including highly charged, touching scenes along with those demonstrating heroism, cowardice, and visceral terror. While descriptions are explicit, action shocking, and language rough, Myers has kept a tight rein on his telling, presenting, in unadorned prose, the way it was. And he unfolds the separate and connected stories of Richie and his squad so deftly that it is hard to believe they are not real.--Zvirin, Stephanie Copyright 2017 Booklist
