Review: Prepare to be Enthralled and Moved
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 7, 2012
MADDOG AND MISS KITTY is a great read and one that I highly recommend. Through a well-written in-your-face tale of love and war, Bert Carson weaves the full experience of the Vietnam veteran - from enlistment to deployment to their return home and struggle with PTSD. This is a grisly war story full of action and urgency. Mr. Carson's ability to craft characters whose behaviors and words ring true made me gasp in some places, and brought me to tears in others.Although Mr. Carson assures the reader that MADDOG AND MISS KITTY is a work of fiction, his experience as a Vietnam veteran gives the book the eerie quality of non-fiction. Mr. Carson describes events and emotions with a confidence, a certain vividness, that can only come from someone who has walked this particular walk and experienced first-hand that which he writes about. I know a few of those who served in Vietnam - warriors and medics - and this was a difficult book for me to read. It gave me an insight, beautiful and painful, of what they might have experienced both abroad and on their return home to the United States.In spite of its sometimes harrowing content, MADDOG AND MISS KITTY is an uplifting read - an earlier reviewer described it as transforming, and I agree. The four short stories that Mr. Carson includes at the end of the book are equally enjoyable. Give MADDOG AND MISS KITTY a try - you won't be disappointed.