Lacks structure and conclusiveness, but effectively underscores the widely reported disaffection of recent West Point...
The heavy toll of fighting on two fronts, as experienced by the first U.S. Military Academy class to graduate into active combat since Vietnam.
West Point’s 2002 graduates were special, points out the author, a former Army reserve officer who reported from Iraq for the Washington Post in 2007. Their graduation coincided with the Academy’s celebration of its bicentennial, but these new lieutenants were also headed for a war in progress. The Point broke with tradition by allowing the class of 2002 to stay in their original companies for all four years, instead of reassigning them to new companies halfway through. An unusual camaraderie and closeness was the result, Murphy notes. He plumbed these associations for several years to produce this slice of military life that focuses on a handful of 2002 classmates, most acquainted with each other, who endured as many as three deployments to the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. Affable Californian Todd Bryant opted for an armored brigade that the Army actually sent to Iraq without its tanks; married and a new father, Bryant died in a patrolling Humvee hit by an IED. Drew Sloan from Arkansas was luckier in Afghanistan, but wounds suffered in a Taliban attack required more than a year of multiple surgeries and left his face and body scarred. Murphy stresses that these young Army officers, often leading platoons into hostile territory day after day, made the sacrifices and suffered the brunt of a brutal, violent conflict that America tried its best to ignore, marked as it was by mismanagement at multiple levels and actively opposed by many from the start.
Lacks structure and conclusiveness, but effectively underscores the widely reported disaffection of recent West Point classes with the military.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8679-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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