One of the better reflections on the war in Iraq, with enough sense of on-the-ground combat reality to hold disturbing...
Gripping, disturbing account of American advisors in Iraq, focused on several National Guardsmen and the Iraqi soldiers (jundis) they trained.
Besides being meticulously written, this book has an unusual pedigree: West, a novelist (Four Days to Veracruz, 2003, etc.), former Marine and son of renowned military writer Bing West, was recalled in 2006 to serve a second combat tour in Iraq, as an advisor in Khalidiya, a city beset by a brutal insurgency. West’s personal experience makes up the final third of the book, but the primary section focuses on the National Guard advisor team that he helped replace. Initially, their war resembled an unholy combination of Black Hawk Down and Catch-22. Unlike full-time soldiers, they were abruptly withdrawn from civilian life, given outdated training in counterinsurgency and sent to a posting outside the city to pair up with an Iraqi battalion, a move meant to showcase the Bush administration’s intent to “stand down” as Iraqi units “stood up.” West vividly captures the personalities of the advisor team, who quickly found themselves contending with frequent sniper and bomb attacks, culminating in the death of a well-liked U.S. corpsman. The author’s crisp writing makes more apparent the material waste and absurdity of America’s “small wars.” Despite the advisors’ bravery and good intentions, they were consistently undercut by supply problems and chain-of-command issues that inevitably gave the Guardsmen short shrift. West ably captures the drama in the initially tense relationships between the Americans and their beleaguered Iraqi counterparts, the remnants of Iraq’s professional officer class, and he’s sensitive to the nuances of Iraqi culture, which initially allowed al-Qaeda and other insurgents to fester in hardscrabble cities like Khalidiya. The author argues that the unit trained by the Guardsmen evolved into a determined and nonpartisan fighting force: “For a bunch of carpenters and cops, they were a pretty determined bunch.”
One of the better reflections on the war in Iraq, with enough sense of on-the-ground combat reality to hold disturbing portents for future “small wars.”Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5593-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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