Customer Reviews

You'll Never Know Book One " A Good and Decent Man"

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm a journalist with more than 30 years of experience in interviewing men and women around the world. Across those decades, I've profiled Holocaust survivors, Holocaust rescuers, Japanese internees, Tuskegee Airmen and a whole host of other men and women who played notable roles in the global conflict that still defines our world.

What Carol Tyler discovered and turned into the first volume of a new series is this: Millions of American families were shaped by men and women who served in WWII. But, most of those men and women, especially those who actually experienced combat, rarely talked about their wartime experiences. This was true in my own family in which the discovery of a shoebox of photographs resulted, some years ago, in a major newspaper story about a grandfather's remarkable and sometimes tragic life in the war years.

Carol argues passionately in this book that our rediscovery of these memories is vital to understanding the way millions of American families were shaped by the war years. I'm not alone in so strongly recommending this book and "seconding" her argument. She's also received high praise from the New York Times.

This first volume is formatted as an album-shaped graphic novel (a comic book format). We meet Carol and her daughter, plus of course her Mom and Dad--and a number of other people in their extended family. In Volume 1, Carol takes us through the opening up of her father's wartime memories, late in life, and her exploration of a photo album from that era.

I'm eagerly awaiting Volume 2, but right now--grab a copy of Volume 1. A big focus of my own work is trying to spot great resources for small-group discussion and this one is terrific. I can envision opening up this book with a small group, exploring the issues Carol lays out for us--then inviting a group to spend a month, or even a couple of months, opening up the memories in their own families.

There's a bittersweet quality to You'll Never Know, C. Tyler's disarming memoir about attempting to learn what her father went through in World War II. Shaped like a scrapbook (oversized, much wider than it is long), You'll Never Know is like a collection of memories, some old, some recently found, with the notes and perceptions usually written on the backs of photos moved front and center.

They're aren't any photos, of course; just Tyler's impressive drawings and inks, vividly colored in an amazing array of fluidity. The horrors of World War II are summed up rapidly in a one-page intro to the book. Of course, that's not the focus here, not really. It's the aftermath, the returning home of the Greatest Generation and their settling into their resumed lives that Tyler is interested in. "You would never know he had participated in it," Tyler writes as way of introduction to her father, Chuck. But she knows better than to think it is all due to modesty (an early image in the book presents a diorama of her father's city, a cloud above spelling out "Visible" and, tucked down at the bottom of the page with an arrow pointing up, the words "Not-all-scars R..."--a subtle way of spelling out "Not all scars are visible," thus giving us one small insight into Chuck's psyche).

As the memoir begins, Tyler is married with a child, but that soon changes. Her husband decides to leave to pursue a new love, leaving Tyler to deal with the emotional fallout. She focuses all the more on her father's story, trying to get him to come out of his self-imposed shell and reveal what he had been through. He acquiesces, and the dichotomy of present heartache versus past wartime trauma form the riveting crux of the story. Why Chuck chooses to tell his own story when he does is almost as interesting as what he unveils.

The first book in a planned trilogy (this one is subtitled A Good and Decent Man), You'll Never Know is so compellingly honest and unself-conscious that it makes its point all the more poignant. Tyler doesn't lavish her father with hero worship, nor does she try to build him up into anything he isn't. She simply wants to get at the truth and know this man better. For those who were raised by or have been close to a vet, it's a common feeling, a longing to know more in order to help better understand. Tyler does it so beautifully that we're eager to see her succeed for our own sake as much as hers.

-- John Hogan

Carol Tyler has taken her talent to a whole new level. I've always liked her line and color and the unpretentious way her stories unfold - she doesn't tell the story she thinks you want hear, she tells you what IS! I didn't know what to expect from A Good and Decent Man - I thought I had probably read enough WWII memoirs but yet it was Carol Tyler and I wanted to see what she had to say. The book grabbed me on so many levels, it seems like an evolutionary step for autobiographical Graphic Literature. The art is beautiful and the storytelling is straightforward yet extrmely complex and resonates and gets under your skin like a well crafted novel. She weaves the story and leaves you hanging, waiting impatiently for the next installment. I read an online review that compared this book to both Maus and Fun Home, and wondered if it could live up to that kind of billing. Well, it's nothing like either of those books, but it's certainly in the same league. Can't wait for volume II!!

I received both of C. Tyler's You'll Never Know Book One ("A Good and Decent Man") and its sequel (Book Two: "Collateral Damage") as a gift. When I opened this first book, I read it in one sitting, enthralled. There is a mindfulness to this that reads on several levels, beginning with its production quality: beautiful color rendering, paper quality and first-rate publication by Fantagraphics Books speaks to the intrinsic quality of this authentic story. Fast forward an hour later and I'm into her second book. I love Tyler's voice, the way she's rendered parallel stories through time, nuanced and effortless. There is the sepia album homage to her father, a World War II veteran. This comes to life through the course of the narrative as the protagonist wants to give her father's unchronicled and often unspoken years in combat and long held memories of his love for her mother back to him as a gift. Chagall-like characters simultaneously speak to the unfolding emotional story, mythic truths and mysteries of our place in family. And all of this is carried through by way of a signature style, a visual day-to-day chronicle of events and impressions that the artist/protagonist experiences. All the textures of time and feeling braid this bigger narrative. And it reads seamless, the way these things happen all at once. It is rich and authentic and I love her work.

Generations examined, with a focus on the WWII generation, but a measure of an experience through time. Very well done, can't wait for the next one.

I feel a bit churlish giving this book only three stars, given how much effort it clearly took to produce and how significant a problem post traumatic stress disorder has once again become for society. That said, the work has some flaws, one of which is the author's refusal to stick to the point. She is supposed to be telling the story of how her father came back from service in World War Two with some nasty repressed memories and how these gradually emerged.

Unfortunately, she takes us off on so many digressions that by the time the book ends we've not really learned very much about her father's experiences. To start off with, we learn an awful lot about her childhood. Later on, many pages are eaten up by the author's divorce and subsequent grim adventures with her wayward spouse. Then she wonders whether the way she was brought up by her father affected her ability to relate to men, and we wander through her musings on that.

The drawing is excellent and the author clearly cares very much about her father and what he went through. I just wish she'd exercised more discipline when it came to describing his life and made the work more about him and less about her.