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Summary
Summary
A unique memoir of a "tough guy's" life,Gutsis a sharp and wry meditation on American manhood A self-confessed reckless jerk, Robert Nylen has spent the last four years grappling with Big Diseases (cancer and diabetes), an astonishing twelve broken bones, and ten surgeries. And yetGutsis not a mere chronicle of injuries, but an unsparing and hilarious memoir, war story, self-help book, and confessional. Nylen shows how a callow suburban kid growing up in the 1950s and 1960s became a slovenly, hard-partying, immature fraternity boy before growing up quickly--fighting in Vietnam, and being wounded multiple times in the line of fire. It was then that he started the real risky business--in the media world. Some of his ventures succeeded, and some failed. He exercised feverishly and often displayed a complete lack of common sense. And then he got sick with colon cancer. Hilarious and moving, this is a riveting account seen through the scope of a national obsession with toughness. Whether he's punching Razr-scooter riders in Chinatown or walking point as platoon leader in the Vietnam jungle, Nylen never backs down from a good fight--and he has the scars to prove it. From the Hardcover edition.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Vietnam vet, cofounder of New England Monthly and a media consultant, Nylen, who died last year, shares with punchy humor and tremendous grace his tough approach to taking risks and staring down exacting bosses as well as cancer. Cherishing such stoical role models as Don Quixote and Ulysses S. Grant (as well as his own father, who spent his prime years as a DuPont executive before a traumatic fall altered his life permanently), Nylen celebrates America's admiration with gutsiness, and his own lifetime attempts (frequently foolish) to make the "Cool Guys Hall of Fame." The bulk of this memoir is Nylen's facetious though moving account of his stint as an infantry officer in Vietnam in 1968, and the men he loved and lost-the ghastly experience, he assures readers, was never accurately depicted in popular movies. Shell-shocked, married after release from the army, "simulating a normal person" and appearing unemployable, he began his accidental career as a media ad salesman starting at Look magazine, dealing with tough bosses like Bill Dunn at U.S. News and World Report and Mike Levy at Texas Monthly before embarking on his own. Diagnosed with colorectal cancer stage III when he was 60, he endured treatments, surgeries, pain and frequent accidents of his own making, but preserves his cheerful, frank, optimistic and ever competitive spirit in the face of mortal adversity. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
IT is haunting to read a memoir by a writer who was racing against incurable cancer to get his words on paper, and died in December 2008 shortly after completing his work. You open Robert Nylen's book, "Guts," with a mixture of sadness and curiosity, braced for the inevitable. Damn, he is going to make me care about him, and mourn his untimely death. I was torn between rushing through this absorbing and disjointed story or deliberately slowing the pace, aware that once the book ended, Nylen's raw, funny, urgent voice would be forever stilled. Book titles are often mere clever marketing gimmicks, but this one aptly hightights Nylen's themes and narrative. The word "guts" refers to his meditation on American manhood and the toughness this Army officer showed in Vietnam - as well as to Nylen's own internal parts bursting out of his body during treatment for colorectal cancer. His "reckless" nature is presented as an out-of-control character flaw: throughout his life, Nylen was driven to perform colossally stupid acts, large and small, including endangering his platoon through cowboy antics. Brash and unrepentant four decades later, right after major surgery he defied common sense by pushing a car off an ice-slicked road, with predictably disastrous results. With ample reason, Nylen asks himself, "Why do I take such dumb risks over and again?" The son of a gregarious DuPont executive whose constant transfers kept the family on the move, Nylen learned at a young age that even a prudently lived existence can go awry. His older sister, Sue, born with cerebral palsy, was taunted by schoolmates as a "spaz"; he still feels guilty that he did not offer her more protection. A traumatic event subsequently derailed the household when Nylen was in high school: his father took a wrong turn coming out of the den one night, fell down a flight of stairs and fractured his skull. Permanent brain damage left Bertil Nylen bewildered and unemployable. Also, Robert Nylen's grandfather had died as the result of a bad fall and a head injury; the author mordantly describes his relatives as "lucky, just not good-lucky." Yet this is neither a whiny nor an angry-at-the-fates book, but rather a helter-skelter romp, an episodic effort to defend, explain and understand a life. In rollicking prose, Nylen exhibits pure exuberance as he throws himself into the world, a cocky, fearless soul anchored only by his endlessly tolerant wife, Kit. The most vivid section recounts Nylen's time in Vietnam: grenades pop, snipers fire, and fear, blood, foolhardy risks and the joy at surviving near-death experiences animate each page. The stories are not new contributions to the genre, but they are his, and he tells them well. After his Army service ended, a weary Nylen attended the Wharton School and then embarked on an enterprising career in magazines, starting out as an ad salesman for Look. "Unlike grunts, few of my new glad-handing comrades had bled on the job, so I had an edge in carnage delivered and received," he writes. "Business and combat are linked by the grim prospect of failure," Nylen's triumphs include being a co-founder of both the quirky, much-admired and now defunct New England Monthly and the award-winning Web site Beliefnet.com. Marking his 60th birthday in 2004 by submitting to a routine colonoscopy, he learned he had third-stage colorectal cancer. Nylen presents gruesomely honest descriptions of his multiple surgeries, infections and relapses; this tough-it-out guy has no uplifting inspiration and spiritual comfort to share. But he lovingly describes how a fatally ill Ulysses S. Grant, desperate to support his family, scrawled out what would become a best-selling memoir, dying four days after correcting the galley proofs. Nylen's book is maddening in many ways: he repeats stories and recounts events out of order, as if in a morphine stream-of-consciousness haze. Nonetheless, the author connects. He makes you think; at times he makes you smile at his adventures; and, most of all, he makes you wish you had known him. Meryl Gordon, the author of "Mrs. Astor Regrets," is the director of magazine writing at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Black Ice A warm day in late December 2007 proved me nuts, and an idiot, again. I was in a hurry. Had to drive 190 miles south from our western Massachusetts home to take a meeting in Manhattan and then go to a party. Hastily, I gassed my car at Neighbors convenience store. As I sped away, a pretty girl at the next pump was trying to tell me something...important. She waved Gasoline spewed sideways. My sweet Samaritan retrieved her barefoot toddler and ran away to avoid being blown up. Mortified, I tried to reconnect the line to the pump. It was like trying to cap Old Faithful with a saucer. Gas soaked me, making me a potential torch. One spark and I'd be a one-man Hindenburg. I raced inside to rinse my stinging eyes with tap water. Blearily, I watched volunteer firemen assess the risk. Mere seconds after my SS Valdez had breached on dry ground, they determined that therewasn't much chance of an explosion. The dry air had sped evaporation. The damage: roughly five hundred dollars for the pump, four bucks' worth of kitty litter to absorb runoff, and a day out of service for Neighbors' regular pump. Went home. Threw away my parka, rabbit-fur hat, and mittens. Bathed. Sniffed. Bathed again. Changed into fresh clothes. Rushed to Manhattan, eyes oozing. The sublime Taconic Parkway blurred by, its lovely scenery unseen. Stopped a couple of times to slather ointment on my aching face. Dabbed tears every few minutes. Over tea in the Soho Grand Hotel, my face afire, I told a young woman that I usuallydidn't look like a molting chameleon. Not knowing my baseline of ugliness--it was our first meeting--she lied, sweet Charlize Theron to my grotesque Hellboy. "You look fine!" Next, it was party time. Beliefnet's directors and bankers nestled in a posh Greenwich Village restaurant to celebrate the sale of the company. Steven Waldman and I had started Beliefnet in 1998 (after wecouldn't find money to start a print magazine). We changed the fledgling project into an online medium, got plenty of money, then even more money, and then we went bankrupt. I'd quit before the company declared Chapter 11 after discovering I was both irreligious and aspiritual. Long after I'd left, Steve had reorganized, raised more money, and led the pared-down company to success. On May 1, 2007, Beliefnet won a National Magazine Award for Online Excellence--despite never having published a real print magazine. Steve graciously thanked me before 2,300 hundred bejeweled, bedecked media mavens, John Waters, Edie Falco, and K. T. Tunstall in Lincoln Center. Meanwhile, I was attending to my busted ostomy appliance in themen's room. Every unpleasantness is a learning opportunity. A double-breasted tuxedo and a big, wide cummerbund effectively disguiseone's failed artificial plumbing system. (Perhaps I should wear a cummerbund everywhere: Whole Foods, Target, the Ashfield Hardware Store, and evenings with friends: festive!) Six months later, RupertMurdoch's Fox Entertainment had paid us a pretty penny--tens of millions of pennies--for Beliefnet, but then again,they'd paid sixty-five times more for The Wall Street Journal. That evening, I explained my horrid face to seven fellow board members, one by one. Like young Charlize, they pretended not to notice my ruddy, scaling skin from a potion incendiary and toxic drugs that Estée Lauderdoesn't sell. Alone, each ingredient makes you peel in red, scabby slabs. Mixed, you look insane, too. Back in western Massachusetts the next week, I asked Neighbors' proprietor, Phil Nolan, how much I owed him. He said:"It's all taken care of, Bob.Don't worry."That's whathe'd said when I pulled the s Excerpted from Guts: Combat, Hell-raising, Cancer, Business Start-ups, and Undying Love: One American Guy's Reckless, Lucky Life by Robert Nylen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| 1 Black Ice | p. 3 |
| 2 Evidence that I'm No Tough Guy | p. 20 |
| 3 Back in Asia, 1968; Among Things Un-Carried: No Camera, Thanks | p. 38 |
| 4 More Jungle Trouble: Scrolling Down the Devil's PowerPoint | p. 47 |
| 5 Nervous, Frowsy Nancy | p. 65 |
| 6 What Crawls on Its Belly and Blows Us All Up? | p. 73 |
| 7 Big Blond Grunts and Little Brown Kids | p. 84 |
| 8 Two Sergeants-One Heroic, the Elder Not So Much | p. 92 |
| 9 Shamming: Happy, Kinda Safe | p. 95 |
| 10 Instead of Bursting Hearts with Bullets, Something New: Winning Minds | p. 98 |
| 11 Our Personal Charm Offensive | p. 104 |
| 12 Gunny: Lifer Gyrene | p. 110 |
| 13 Mom Saves My Life | p. 121 |
| 14 Mom: Farmer's Daughter Turned Flapper; Dad: Squarehead Turned Bomb Maker, Fall Guy | p. 126 |
| 15 Me, Back in the Land of the Giganormous PX | p. 135 |
| 16 After the War, a Job, Finally; What's Scarier than War? | p. 139 |
| 17 The Third Newsmagazine ... No ... Make That Number Four! | p. 146 |
| 18 Tough Bosses | p. 152 |
| 19 Starting Up, Cringing; Raising Money; Danger on the Roof | p. 169 |
| 20 Tough Yankees | p. 180 |
| 21 From Old to New Media | p. 186 |
| 22 Why Kit Manages Our Finances | p. 193 |
| 23 The Beginning of What Proves Not to Be the End | p. 197 |
| 24 The Spurious Cancer-as-War Metaphor; Some Un-Ironic Heroes | p. 206 |
| 25 Foolishness Continues; Backwards, to Infirmity | p. 222 |
| 26 Becoming a Little Bit Stoic | p. 234 |
| 27 Enduring, Singing Endtime Songs, Rating War Movies | p. 240 |
| 28 Remembering the Forgotten | p. 243 |
