by Kayla Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 10, 2014
A brave book filled with gore and trauma—and superb storytelling. A perfect complement to David Finkel’s Thank You for Your...
An Iraq War veteran chronicles the emotionally raw, disarmingly candid saga of herself and her fellow veteran husband returning to civilian life psychologically and physically wounded.
Williams previously shared her brutal saga of being female in a combat zone (Love My Rifle More Than You, 2005), alluding to it occasionally in this follow-up memoir. While in combat, she briefly met and felt close to Brian McGough. But he moved to a new assignment, where he suffered a severe brain injury from an explosive device. Stationed back in the United States, Williams located McGough, and they began a romantic relationship marked by threatened and actual violence due to his post-traumatic stress disorder and her undiagnosed psychological disabilities. Their military commands and the Veterans Administration seemed ill-equipped to deal sensitively and competently with such disabilities. In excruciating detail, Williams shares scenes from a marriage almost certain to explode. Even when she was away from her husband, Williams struggled with certain aspects of everyday life. Shopping alone in a gigantic Wal-Mart, she was overwhelmed by the variety of products, resentful that the civilian population was so spoiled, and anxiety-ridden that she could not view any store exits from the endless aisles of merchandise. Though counseling by civilians and military personnel occasionally helped both the author and her husband, progress toward a normal life seemed illusory—at best, one step forward and two steps back. How Williams and McGough partially conquered the demons, saved their marriage, began to rear children and helped countless other damaged veterans makes for an inspiring but never maudlin narrative. The memoir is certainly not a feminist tract, but Williams does examine the special adjustment problems of female combat veterans.
A brave book filled with gore and trauma—and superb storytelling. A perfect complement to David Finkel’s Thank You for Your Service (2013).Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-23936-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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