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Penguin Press
August 2014
On Sale: July 24, 2014
ISBN: 1594205663 EAN: 9781594205668 Kindle: B00G3L6M0W Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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.
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