Blue Eyed Boy (Timberg) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
In a clear confiding voice, [Timberg’s] autobiography Blue-Eyed Boy speaks to you like an American Proust, straight from the start: 'Falling asleep is never a problem for me. Waking up always is.' As he approached age 70, he at last let himself look back at the jagged scenery of his life….There’s a hardwon beauty in those crevices…. Timberg’s memoir is a searing loss of innocence tale, one that may address a wider swath of college baby boomers in the 1960s than he thought. Whatever side you were on when it came to the Vietnam War, it ended badly. Nobody won. America suffered a shattering loss of innocence over that war, starting in 1967, the year Timberg—who goes by "Bob"—lost the man in the mirror. Then comes the best part of his journey: a mordant tale told of adult resurrection.
US News & World Report


Blue-Eyed Boy, the just-released memoir by wounded veteran and journalist Robert Timberg, excels with limpid writing and gripping personal travail and triumph, never once hinting at or lamenting what-might-have-been, even as it admirably meets all the requisites of an exemplary memoir…. Forcing the reader to seriously ponder obligations and responsibilities to one’s country and society, Blue-Eyed Boy is a welcome tonic, an elixir of life delivered with hard-hitting flesh-and-blood reality. Refreshingly honest in depicting less than admirable personal behavior, Timberg is equally blunt in recounting the arduously difficult and tortuously slow road to mental, psychological, and physical recovery. In spite of numerous setbacks and indignities in the struggle to cope and "come back," Timberg thrives as much in his writing as he has in life.
American Conservative


In this straightforward and unsentimental account, Timberg traces the trajectory of his career, from promising Naval Academy graduate and wounded war veteran to success as a journalist.... [He] had to confront the political split in the country between those who fought in the war (few of the privileged at Stanford) and those who dodged their draft calls, a subject that keeps him simmering throughout. Eventually, his marriage crumbled under the stress of recovery, but Timberg, a Nieman fellow, devoted his time to writing books.
Publishers Weekly


[W]hat's especially important here is that, having immersed himself in reporting on the Iran-Contra scandal and talking with the Vietnam-era veterans at the heart of it (see his The Nightingale's Song), he finally saw clearly how the Vietnam War has shaped this nation.
Library Journal


This thoroughly absorbing autobiography really begins with the author’s life-altering experience of being badly wounded (and severely and permanently disfigured) as a marine officer in Vietnam..... Timberg will strike many readers as demonstrating the truth of the notion that 'genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains'—although, in Timberg’s case, he first had to demonstrate a large capacity for enduring pain.
Booklist


In 1986, the Sun tapped [Timberg] to cover the Iran-Contra scandal.... The scandal, and the book that later emerged from it, became a kind of extended catharsis for Timberg. Both forced him to revisit his own brutal experiences and, in so doing, help a nation still tormented by Vietnam find the beginnings of its own peace. An empathetic and extremely candid memoir.
Kirkus Reviews