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The Bamboo Chest: An Adventure in Healing the Trauma of War
Finally, the whole, uplifting and extraordinary story can be be $20 Million in Captain Kidd's treasure on an island off the coast of Vietnam; an eighteen-year-old photojournalist from California, haunted by the Vietnam War. Travel with Frederick "Cork" Graham in The Bamboo Chest from San Francisco to Thailand and a Socialist Republic of Vietnam political prison on an amazingly healing adventure that will capture the world's imagination for years!
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 21, 2013
I don't recall how I heard about this book..but I am on a quest to read all of the books on my shelves that I never got around to, and there it was. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it is a gripping, true story that kept my attention pretty much from start to finish. The author was a late teen -- a rather spoiled,somewhat bratty American youth -- who rebelled against his father by running off to Thailand to become a combat photojournalist, without any experience or contacts. Then he naively agreed to join a Brit he didn't know anything about on a hunt for treasure on a Vietnamese island -- a quest that seemed pretty obviously harebrained. So was it really that surprising that he ended up in a Vietnamese prison? No. But his 11-month stay, often in solitary confinement and with repeated beating, WAS shocking. Or it would have been if Graham's writing style wasn't quite so ….almost flippant in some spots. He seemed to bounce back so quickly that I found myself thinking it couldn't have been that bad. That's probably unfair though.
**SPOILER ALERT""
It also was extremely anticlimactic to find out towards the end of the book that the childhood trauma Graham kept hinting at throughout the story, and which allegedly resulted in PTSD, was actually the murder of his pet rabbit, by his father, when he was around 8 years old. (My reaction: WTF???) Don't get me wrong…I'm sure that having your parent kill your pet is indeed very emotional. And I can understand why it would cause serious strains in the relationship. But Graham kept tying his trauma to the Vietnam War, because his pet "bunny" was killed in Vietnam (where his father worked), at around the time the U.S. was departing. To me, however, that is a a bit of a stretch. The bunny affair was entirely separate from the war.
What I would have liked to read more about are some of the events he inferred happened after he finally returned home -- primarily problems that resulted from his temporary fame. And he apparently did many odd things after he was home -- ranging from survivalist living in Alaska to hanging around the wars in Central America. He mentioned them briefly and then dropped them, leaving a feeling of incompleteness. Was he a really successful person like his arrogance suggested? Or more of a lost soul like his seeming aimlessness inferred?
I also didn't like two things about his writing style and voice. 1) He used exclamation points so much that he came off like he was still an immature teen when he wrote the book. In actual fact, he wrote it more than 10 years later. 2) He had a very strong, almost right-wing bias against Communists -- and an over-the-top patriotism -- even before he was imprisoned. I can see, obviously, why he'd be turned off by the label, given his experience, but his universal disdain for every Vietnamese who opposed U.S. involvement, for example, came across to me as bigotry and exceptionalism.
**SPOILER ALERT""
It also was extremely anticlimactic to find out towards the end of the book that the childhood trauma Graham kept hinting at throughout the story, and which allegedly resulted in PTSD, was actually the murder of his pet rabbit, by his father, when he was around 8 years old. (My reaction: WTF???) Don't get me wrong…I'm sure that having your parent kill your pet is indeed very emotional. And I can understand why it would cause serious strains in the relationship. But Graham kept tying his trauma to the Vietnam War, because his pet "bunny" was killed in Vietnam (where his father worked), at around the time the U.S. was departing. To me, however, that is a a bit of a stretch. The bunny affair was entirely separate from the war.
What I would have liked to read more about are some of the events he inferred happened after he finally returned home -- primarily problems that resulted from his temporary fame. And he apparently did many odd things after he was home -- ranging from survivalist living in Alaska to hanging around the wars in Central America. He mentioned them briefly and then dropped them, leaving a feeling of incompleteness. Was he a really successful person like his arrogance suggested? Or more of a lost soul like his seeming aimlessness inferred?
I also didn't like two things about his writing style and voice. 1) He used exclamation points so much that he came off like he was still an immature teen when he wrote the book. In actual fact, he wrote it more than 10 years later. 2) He had a very strong, almost right-wing bias against Communists -- and an over-the-top patriotism -- even before he was imprisoned. I can see, obviously, why he'd be turned off by the label, given his experience, but his universal disdain for every Vietnamese who opposed U.S. involvement, for example, came across to me as bigotry and exceptionalism.
January 13, 2011
Excellent coming of age, and psychologically deep self-healing story in a truly bizarre manner: a treasure hunting adventure in Vietnam, a prison sentence for an American teen, 8 years after the war!
author's website: www.corkgraham.com
author's website: www.corkgraham.com
May 10, 2011
Wrote this...it's also now on Kindle as a full 2nd Edition
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews