A Rift In The Earth
By: James Reston, Jr. / Narrated By: Jeff Cummings
Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
Humanity at its worst and best
You ready for a book about culture wars, history, art, how we choose to remember? Then you’re just in time for A Rift in the Earth, by Vietnam vet James Reston. Full disclosure: I’ve never seen the memorial, have only had my breath taken away from photos. And though Hart’s additional sculpture comes off as a second-rate add-on created solely to pacify the livid, well, gosh– I want to see that too. I know the darkness, the solitude of a lonely death that Maya Lin’s wall makes you feel. But I want to see Hart’s depiction of fearful youth, exhausted but trudging on.
The book covers the genesis of the wall idea from a young and idealistic Lin, and follows as there is immediate backlash, compromises that have to be made but are hard to swallow. Lin deals with doubters, with haters, with outright racism (Ross Perot refers to her as “Egg Roll” because of her Asian background). And though she comes off as unyielding and unlikable at many, many points throughout the book, I still wound up feeling for her because she went through a lot and at a very young age. From detractors who served, all the way up to a President (Reagan) who could have done much to help heal a damaged and hurting nation, Lin battles her way through the emotional, the political, the sanctimonious. At times I wanted to throttle her because she refused to alter her design even if changes were meant to make it more structurally sound. But by the end, and you only have to look at, to feel the result, I felt it was good she stuck to her guns against the discord.
While the book deals with the social unrest of the times, with the fact that it was a losing war that had no good reason to occur, Reston writes with sensitivity and care, never chiding, deriding, scolding. And at the end he journeys to Vietnam to find answers and maybe even to find a sense of closure concerning the death of a good buddy during the war.
A Rift in the Earth is the best kind of history book because it doesn’t come off dry but hits you where you live, breathe, where you hurt. Jeff Cummings does a masterful job in navigating the sometimes treacherous water which can be fraught with emotion, with scathing scorn, with a sense of tragedy. Many, many individuals lost their lives in Vietnam; it’s so good that somebody remembered. So that we all can….
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