My Detachment
Reviews
“Poignant… Remarkable… There are a lot of reasons to read My Detachment … perfectly rendered by one of our most original writers.”
—The Boston Globe
“Kidder is a masterful storyteller with an intuitive understanding of the line between personal demons and larger social constructs.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“My Detachment is written on a knife-edge. The prose… shimmer[s] under the reader’s gaze… [An] acerbic, honest, moving memoir.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Tweaking multiple genres, Tracy Kidder has… unconventionally… written a war story without violence… [Full of] candor and humor.”
—The Village Voice
“This memoir of a young man at war is unlike any you’ve come to expect—at once hilarious and sad, sweet and distressing, a compelling, candid, and poignantly comic portrait of youthful self-absorption in the midst of the absurdity and tragedy of war.”
—Jonathan Harr, author of A Civil Action and The Lost Painting
“His most personal… book to date… Kidder achieves a M*A*S*H-like ambience, at once funny and wrenching. War is an appalling mix of the absurd and the catastrophic, the banal and the profound, a confounding and tragic reality Kidder’s behind-the-scenes memoir brings forthrightly to light.”
—Booklist
“Muted, ironic, thoughtful, My Detachment is a meditation in a time of war—and a candid depiction of how the misdirections of youth can shape and haunt a life.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“Kidder’s great talent ever since his Pulitzer-winning The Soul of a New Machine has been his ability to take ordinary details and give them the shape, metaphors, and rhythms of a novel… [The] book works because [Kidder’s] so candid about his insecurities, and how they played into his need to deceive others (and himself) about his role in Vietnam.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“In Kidder’s world, the absurdities and dark comedy of war mix with danger and the solace of comradeship. The result is a breezy and concise tale, the work of a master craftsman. Don’t miss it.”
—Houston Chronicle
