Blue Eyed Boy (Timberg)

Blue-Eyed Boy: A Memoir
Robert Timberg, 2014
Penguin Group (USA)
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594205668


Summary
Acclaimed journalist Robert Timberg’s extraordinary, long-awaited memoir of his struggle to reclaim his life and find his calling after being severely burned as a young Marine lieutenant in Vietnam

In January 1967, Robert Timberg was a short-timer, counting down the days until his combat tour ended. He had thirteen days to go before he got to go back home to his wife in Southern California. That homecoming would eventually happen, but not in thirteen days, and not as the person he once was. The moment his vehicle struck a Vietcong land mine divided his life into before and after.

He survived, barely, with third-degree burns over his face and much of his body.  It would have been easy to give up.  Instead, Robert Timberg began an arduous and uncertain struggle back—not just to physical recovery, but to a life of meaning.  Remarkable as his return to health was—he endured thirty-five operations, one without anesthesia—just as remarkable was his decision to reinvent himself as a journalist and enter one of the most public of professions. Blue-Eyed Boy is a gripping, occasionally comic account of what it took for an ambitious man, aware of his frightful appearance but hungry for meaning and accomplishment, to master a new craft amid the pitying stares and shocked reactions of many he encountered on a daily basis.

By the 1980s, Timberg had moved into the upper ranks of his profession, having secured a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and a job as White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun. Suddenly his work brought his life full circle: the Iran-Contra scandal broke. At its heart were three fellow Naval Academy graduates and Vietnam-era veterans, Oliver North, Bud McFarlane, and John Poindexter. Timberg’s coverage of that story resulted in his first book, The Nightingale’s Song, a powerful work of narrative nonfiction that follows these three academy graduates and two others—John McCain and Jim Webb—from Annapolis through Vietnam and into the Reagan years.

In Blue-Eyed Boy, Timberg relates how he came to know and develop a deep understanding of these five men, and how their stories helped him understand the ways the Vietnam War and the furor that swirled around it continued to haunt him, and the nation as a whole, as they still do even now, nearly four decades after its dismal conclusion.

Like others of his generation, Robert Timberg had to travel an unexpectedly hard and at times bitter road. In facing his own life with the same tools of wisdom, human empathy, and storytelling grit he has always brought to his journalism, he has produced one of the most moving and important memoirs of our time. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1942-43
• Where—New York City, NY area
• Education—U.S. Naval Academy; M.A., Stanford University
• Currently—lives in Bethesda, Maryland


Robert Timberg is an American journalist, writer, and author of four books, including The Nightingale's Song (1995) and his memoir, Blue-Eyed Boy (2014)

Timberg was raised in the New York City area. His father was American musician and composer Sammy Timberg. He received his college education at the United States Naval Academy and his journalism degree at Stanford University. He served with the American Marines in Vietnam from March 1966 to February 1967. He worked for many years as a reporter for The Evening Sun and The Baltimore Sun. He is also the author of John McCain: An American Odyssey (1999) and State of Grace: A Memoir of Twilight Time (2005), a book about his experiences with sandlot football and growing up.

Robert Timberg, who was disfigured by a land mine as a Marine in Vietnam, went on to become a successful journalist. His memoir Blue Eyed Boy charts his struggle to recover from his wounds (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/3/2014.)

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

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