Jun 20 2011
Give Me Tomorrow: The Korean War’s Greatest Untold Story – The Epic Stand of the Marines of George Company by Patrick O’Donnell
The next couple of books I will be reviewing pertain to the “Forgotten War” – the Korean War. I think that the Korean War could have been called that a few years ago, but I think that more books have been published recently on the War (David Halberstam’s book brought much-needed attention to the War). Within the study of the Korean War, some subjects have been studied and written about more than others – Inchon and Chosin mainly. As a result, authors who want to write in these areas must dig deeper and write about smaller incidents or units. Such is the case with Patrick O’Donnell’s Give Me Tomorrow: The Korean War’s Greatest Untold Story–The Epic Stand of the Marines of George Company.
Queen of Kings
Donohue manages the dream logic well, modulating registers from one mystery muse to the next with mostly-subtle shifts in dialect and voice. When the key to the puzzle finally is disclosed, however, the answer is an obvious one, and a bit of a new-age, pop-psych let-down, lacking the intellectual crackle of Borges and the tooth-gnashing comedy of Beckett–qualities this seductively irreal novel seems to want to foster. And yet there’s a satisfaction in the telling, and in the notion that stories find their resonances even across the generational tides of forgetting, that ultimately the tale is the only transcendent force we can bring to bear against death and its savage requitals.
