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 Unlike full-time soldiers, they were abruptly withdrawn from civilian life, given outdated training in counterinsurgency and sent to a posting outside the city to pair up with an Iraqi battalion, a move meant to showcase the Bush administration’s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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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