SOURCE: Rogoff, Jay. “Novel Truths and Memory Games.” Shenandoah 46, no. 2 (summer 1996): 99-102.

In the following review, Rogoff argues that In Pharaoh's Army is a honest and complex memoir, praising its style and technique.

Tobias Wolff's 1989 memoir, This Boy's Life, began with a terrible accident: past the overheating car in which young Toby and his mother drive to Utah, a truck without brakes barrels downhill and soon reappears in a ravine at the bottom of a cliff. That accident seemed so cinematic and such a perfect emblem of that book's disasters and close calls, that it is bewildering why Michael Caton-Jones didn't open his film adaptation with it.

Wolff's new Vietnam memoir, In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War, also begins with a traffic disaster, but one in which Wolff plays a more active role:

Some peasants were blocking the road up ahead. I honked the horn but...