Witty, insightful, scathing, appalling and inspiring—a must-read book on the Iraq war.
A former Naval officer examines his time as a member of an energy task force in Baghdad.
Brownfield, a U.S. Naval Academy grad, began his service as a submarine officer. Highly idealistic, he resisted the compromises most new officers made—specifically, cheating on the exams required to certify his competence to run a nuclear reactor. Watching his captain run the sub aground, he learned to distrust the default assumption that maintaining authority is more important than being right. He was ready to leave the Navy for grad school at Yale when, in the aftermath of 9/11, he signed up for service in Iraq. His mission was to help coordinate military and civilian responses to the country’s energy shortages. He quickly found that most of his superiors were merely marking time, doing their best not to shake up the status quo. Brownfield’s major assignment was reading the text of PowerPoint presentations to commanding Gen. George Casey. None of his immediate team showed the least interest in doing anything to improve the ability of average Iraqis to get electricity. Their major contact in the local government received constant death threats, and the author’s superior, a fellow submariner, made empty promises but did nothing practical to help the man. Others were openly cynical in their reasons for being there or just collecting the higher pay for serving in a combat zone. Brownfield, still idealistic, tried to find ways to make a difference. He developed a method to transport heavy diesel engines to their intended destination, only to be blocked by a local official who saw no political advantage in letting them through. A plan to issue millions of compact fluorescent bulbs to Iraqis to save on energy costs was stalled until Gen. David Petraeus came on board—but even with his approval, it remains incomplete. Brownfield left Iraq convinced that energy independence, the professed goal, was in fact a false ideal; instead, he sees “sustainable interdependence” as the only mature approach to solving the world’s energy problems.
Witty, insightful, scathing, appalling and inspiring—a must-read book on the Iraq war.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27169-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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