An accessible view of combat on the ground and a valuable supplement to big-picture histories of the war’s first year.
Chronicling his experiences in Iraq, Campbell movingly portrays his love for the men under his command, and theirs for each other.
His debut memoir also depicts the war’s effect on the author’s faith and hope, shaking the former and shattering the latter as horror after horror befell the Marine platoon that went by the call name Joker One. During a seven-month tour in Ramadi, capital of the Sunni-dominated Anwar province, Lt. Campbell and his company were on hand to witness the critical intensification of hostilities between Coalition forces and the Iraq insurgency in the spring and summer of 2004. The velvet-glove treatment Joker One at first extended to the locals, rather than winning them loyalty and respect, earned the Marines a reputation for being soft. While the Americans mistakenly believed they were merely caretaking the transition to Iraqi rule, the insurgents were arming the masses, threatening heads of household with retaliation against their families if they didn’t allow their homes to be used for weapons storage. On the morning of April 6, 2004, in place of the daily call to prayers, Ramadi awoke to the repeated call of “jihad” emanating from loudspeakers on mosques around the city. Campbell and his men soon found themselves in a hellish situation, forced “to make horrible choices, day in and day out, until it seemed like no matter what path we took, we lost.” Yet during their baptism by fire Campbell observed and recorded numerous acts of heroism and selflessness among his comrades in arms, a diverse group of young men whose collective strength was greater than the sum of their individual weaknesses.
An accessible view of combat on the ground and a valuable supplement to big-picture histories of the war’s first year.Pub Date: March 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6773-2
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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