An aggressive, unapologetic account of one man’s brutal war.
Combat tales from a tank commander–turned-sniper during the Iraq War.
During Sgt. 1st Class Dillard “Crazy Jay” Johnson’s distinguished, 21-year Army career—four Purple Hearts and numerous medals for valor, including the Silver Star—he did a tour in Bosnia and Iraq, where he saw only a bit of action in Desert Storm. Despite having a child at home afflicted with cerebral palsy, he volunteered to return to Iraq in 2003. Commanding a Bradley Fighting Vehicle christened “Carnivore,” Johnson led the invasion, taking part in the war’s first engagement, cutting a large and bloody swath through the country. After contracting radiation cancer from the depleted uranium rounds fired by his tank and after treatment at Walter Reed (where he was given a 1 in 4 chance to live), he returned to Iraq yet again. This time, with the ground war over, Johnson’s mission focused on the insurgency and killing the guerrillas placing the deadly IEDs. He was credited with 121 confirmed kills with his sniper rifle. With the aid of Tarr, Johnson fills in a complete picture of combat: the sleeplessness, the sandstorms, the constant fear of attack; the chaos that leads to killing cows and sheep accidentally and the absurd necessity of killing a lion on purpose; the difficulty of extracting a hunting knife from the ribs of a stabbed insurgent; the mundane lesson learned from packing soap too close to the coffee; the delicate protocol between a sniper and his spotter; the heartbreak at a fellow soldier’s death; the terror induced by incoming fire and the destruction inflicted by outgoing. Military buffs will appreciate the author’s frequent appraisals and comparisons of various tanks, rifles, knives and other accouterments of battle. Most readers will be impressed with Johnson’s undoubted courage and sacrifice, even as they are put off by his memoir’s tone, which too often uncomfortably erases the line between bluffness and boorishness, pride and braggadocio.
An aggressive, unapologetic account of one man’s brutal war.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-228841-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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