From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Vietnam vet, cofounder of New England Monthly and a media consultant, Nylen, who died last year, shares with punchy humor and tremendous grace his tough approach to taking risks and staring down exacting bosses as well as cancer. Cherishing such stoical role models as Don Quixote and Ulysses S. Grant (as well as his own father, who spent his prime years as a DuPont executive before a traumatic fall altered his life permanently), Nylen celebrates America's admiration with gutsiness, and his own lifetime attempts (frequently foolish) to make the Cool Guys Hall of Fame. The bulk of this memoir is Nylen's facetious though moving account of his stint as an infantry officer in Vietnam in 1968, and the men he loved and lost—the ghastly experience, he assures readers, was never accurately depicted in popular movies. Shell-shocked, married after release from the army, simulating a normal person and appearing unemployable, he began his accidental career as a media ad salesman starting at Look magazine, dealing with tough bosses like Bill Dunn at U.S. News and World Report and Mike Levy at Texas Monthly before embarking on his own. Diagnosed with colorectal cancer stage III when he was 60, he endured treatments, surgeries, pain and frequent accidents of his own making, but preserves his cheerful, frank, optimistic and ever competitive spirit in the face of mortal adversity. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Like the best memoirs, this book brings to life the voice and spirit of a remarkable person. It also contains some of the best, and most honest, war-writing I know.”—Tracy Kidder, author of Mountains Beyond Mountains
"What a life! Love and sickness, war and work, told with wit, with an honesty that sometimes burns, and a compassion that brings tears to the eyes.”—Jonathan Harr, author of The Lost Painting
“This is a tough book about a tough man. Nylen explores the interior landscape of an archetypal American man—himself—with courage, honesty, and the gallant humor of a soldier who knows he's fighting his last campaign. Although his voice is as raw as an unhealed wound, it lingers powerfully in your mind. I feel like I have just been through a boot camp on how a man should live, and how he should die.”—Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower
“Its antic, self-mocking charm only enhances the deeper truth of this book: it is a story of extraordinary courage.”—Richard Todd, author of The Thing Itself
“No one braver than Bob Nylen was funnier; no one funnier was braver. And very, very few have ever been more honest about why men behave the way we do. His personal story is singular, but its lessons are universal.—Daniel Okrent, author of Public Editor #1
"Robert Nylen gets it right in Guts: what it takes for a man to go off to war, to kill, to be wounded, to make a living, to raise a family and even to die. Why me? Why them? Who dodges what bullets, and what do you do when the one with your name on it catches up to you? Guts is what it takes to be a man. Guts Bob Nylen had—and in his book he spills them all. "—William Broyles, author of Brothers at Arms
From the Hardcover edition.
"What a life! Love and sickness, war and work, told with wit, with an honesty that sometimes burns, and a compassion that brings tears to the eyes.”—Jonathan Harr, author of The Lost Painting
“This is a tough book about a tough man. Nylen explores the interior landscape of an archetypal American man—himself—with courage, honesty, and the gallant humor of a soldier who knows he's fighting his last campaign. Although his voice is as raw as an unhealed wound, it lingers powerfully in your mind. I feel like I have just been through a boot camp on how a man should live, and how he should die.”—Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower
“Its antic, self-mocking charm only enhances the deeper truth of this book: it is a story of extraordinary courage.”—Richard Todd, author of The Thing Itself
“No one braver than Bob Nylen was funnier; no one funnier was braver. And very, very few have ever been more honest about why men behave the way we do. His personal story is singular, but its lessons are universal.—Daniel Okrent, author of Public Editor #1
"Robert Nylen gets it right in Guts: what it takes for a man to go off to war, to kill, to be wounded, to make a living, to raise a family and even to die. Why me? Why them? Who dodges what bullets, and what do you do when the one with your name on it catches up to you? Guts is what it takes to be a man. Guts Bob Nylen had—and in his book he spills them all. "—William Broyles, author of Brothers at Arms
From the Hardcover edition.
