Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #394646 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-20
• Released on: 2007-02-20
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.com
Another casualty of the Vietnam War, Danielle Trussoni has told her story in Falling Through the Earth with bravado, pride, sadness, and candor. Her father, Daniel, served as a tunnel rat, one of the incredibly brave men who went into the webs of tunnels and rooms searching for Vietnamese guerillas hiding out underground. The heat and stench, the courage combined with fear, the claustrophobic confinement, and the incessant tension are recounted with an immediacy that only one who has been there, or knows someone who has, could tell. In fact, Danielle Trussoni went to Vietnam and was guided through the tunnels, trying to follow, literally, in her father's footsteps.

The Trussoni family of Onalaska, Wisconsin, is famous for bar fights and not much else. Daniel is a thug like his brothers, all of whom pride themselves on being tough guys who might just be mobbed up, although there is no proof of that.

Trussoni Thanksgivings were like boxing matches. There was sure to be a rumble on the front lawn of my grandparents' house and a rematch at the tavern down the street... A little blood before dinner was what aperitifs were to other families.

In this atmosphere, Danielle, her sister Kelly, and her brother Matt are trying to raise themselves, or just stay out of the way. After getting a job and some sense of self, Mom takes on a boyfriend and asks Dad to leave. According to Danielle, Dad is pretty broken up about the departure, so she goes to live with him and is treated to a steady round of women callers. The other two children stay with their Mom. Most evenings, Daniel takes Danielle to Roscoe's, the neighborhood tavern, where she sits and watches him get drunk and tell his Vietnam stories. Over and over again. Every so often, he forgets her and she has to make her own way home.

Danielle is endlessly forgiving of this case-hardened vet who is relentlessly mean, paranoid and petty. He is a prototype of the guy who came home and didn't know why he was a survivor. Trussoni has captured the essence of being in bloody battle one day and home the next, and then trying to make sense of it all.

Alternating chapters tell of her father's time in Vietnam, her own journey there, and their messy lives--starting with the divorce and continuing until her adulthood. Family secrets are revealed; Danielle realizes that her mother was not the only person at fault in the breakup of the marriage and that her defense of her father was not always appropriate.

She is finally able to say, after writing him a letter outlining her grievances, "I wanted you to know I was hurt by the way I grew up. ...I wanted you to know how hard I've tried to get through to you, how much work it has been for me." There has never been a daughter more loyal than Danielle Trussoni. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly
Trussoni's memoir tells many potentially interesting stories: of her father's traumatic experiences as a Vietnam tunnel rat; of her own smalltown Wisconsin childhood in the 1980s with a volatile dad; of her flirtations with delinquency; and of her family history of implied criminal links (involving "the Italian mafia, drug smuggling, and a Chicago pizza joint"). As Trussoni's sister suggests, these are all stories of unconventional lives worthy of "an episode on Jerry Springer." Alas, the book Trussoni has produced, while well-crafted, as befits an Iowa Writers' Workshop alum and award winner, is deadly dull. Told in fashionably nonlinear style, these juxtaposed tales become a hodge-podge shoving the reader about, from hanging out at Roscoe's bar with Trussoni's father, to purchasing a notebook, to getting a bad haircut. Her brother gets hit by a car, her sister gets pregnant after a one-night stand, her father gets cancer. Off and on, a war souvenir skull surfaces, as does a stalker, adding mystery without eventual clarity. In this awkward weave of her father's tale with her self-absorbed growing-up memoir, Trussoni sacrifices emphasis and dilutes empathy. (Mar. 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* After her parents divorced, Danielle Trussoni went to live with her father, Dan, while her siblings stayed with Mom. A hard-drinking former Vietnam tunnel rat haunted by his war experiences, Dan more or less raised Danielle in Roscoe's, the Wisconsin dive bar where he was the most regular of regulars. Danielle took to skipping school and shoplifting, but she eventually got to the University of Wisconsin and then went on to get her MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Who knows if Iowa is to credit, but Trussoni has written a hell of a good memoir. Seamlessly combining memories of her dad's inept parenting with his Vietnam stories (and her own from a recent trip), Trussoni vividly depicts the violence that war can do to veterans' families, but she also shows how easy it is to love a bad father. But Falling through the Earth is not merely tragic. It's also vicious, unsentimental, and often quite funny. One of the best portrayals in recent memory of what it's like to grow up in a screwed-up, working-class family. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Dark and gripping, yet full of hope
All throughout their childhood, Danielle Trussoni and her younger siblings knew one thing -- stay wary of Dad. A veteran of the Vietnam War, Dan Trussoni's duties included the exploration of claustrophobic tunnels, searching for guerrillas.

By the time he made it home, something inside him changed. He had divorced his first wife and abandoned two young children; he drank excessively and was, at best, unreliable for Danielle, Kelly and Matt.

Still, Danielle loved him, simply for being her dad. Wasn't she his namesake? Didn't their familial bond go beyond anything else in their lives? Even after her mother left and her father sunk deeper into alcoholism and one-night stands, Danielle continued with an almost incomprehensible loyalty.

When she is a young woman, Danielle impulsively decides to embark on a group tour of Vietnam. Ignoring the surprise and protests of family and friends, Danielle is determined to see the place her father's life changed, anxious to try to understand him better in order to understand *herself* better.

Trussoni goes from past to present in a highly effective and engrossing manner, combining pathos, history and bits of humor.

well written
I read Trussoni's memoir and found it to be well-written, insightful, and subtlely compelling. It's not the kind of thing that you "can't put down," but it grabs you enough to want to pick the thing back up again once you have set it down.

My only complaint, really, is that it felt like the whole thing was a build-up to something, but I never really saw what it was. And the epilogue confused any sense of what I had Thought the build-up was for.

Casualties of War
Danielle Trussoni, author of Falling through the Earth, is as much a casualty of the Viet Nam war as was her father, Dan, who returned from that war as damaged goods, a man unable to show his wife and children that he loved them. Trussoni's benign neglect of his children forced them to grow up tough and able to solve their own problems because he was a firm follower of the old adage that "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Sadly, their situation shows clearly how the crippling aftereffects of combat can be so easily passed on from one generation to the next, making one wonder where the cycle finally ends.

Dan Trussoni was a volunteer tunnel rat in Viet Nam, one of those incredibly brave men who went alone into the underground tunnel system that allowed Viet Cong soldiers to disappear at will and that provided them with a safe haven to recover from wounds and to hide food and weapons until they were needed. These young American soldiers, armed with little more than a pistol and a flashlight, had to crawl through booby traps and utter darkness never knowing what awaited them around the next corner as they tried to clean out the systems they discovered. It is little wonder that they came back with mental scars that never really heal.

Danielle became aware at an early age of how her father's Viet Nam experience impacted his life. She found the pictures of dead bodies and the human skull that he brought home. She also found that she was largely going to have to raise herself after her parents split up and she decided to live with her father. Dan Trussoni's idea of a little quality time with his daughter was to bring her to his favorite neighborhood bar in which she spent so much time that she was considered to be one of the regulars.

Life for the Trussoni kids was full of surprises, including the appearance of an illegitimate half-sister and a full sister who had been placed for adoption by their parents who felt too young and overwhelmed to keep her when she was born. Danielle was her father's daughter in every way, fearless, tough, brash and willing to take whatever life threw her way. That personality led her to Viet Nam, alone, where she saw for herself some of the same sights and experienced a little of the fear that her father felt while he was there, even forcing herself to "tour" one of the famous tunnel systems with a guide.

Falling through the Earth, with chapters that alternate between views of growing up in the Trussoni family, Dan's Viet Nam war, and Danielle's own trip there, is a fascinating book, one that makes me wish that we would make absolutely certain that our wars are really necessary before we send our young men into them.