“War always smells the same—diesel oil and dust tinged with sadness,” Babchenko reflects. A harrowing, masterfully written...
Apocalypse Now? The guys on the boat had it easy, as this memoir from the Chechnya front demonstrates within a few sentences.
Drafted into the military at 18 during the regime of Boris Yeltsin, “a despotic leader [who] couldn’t have cared less about individuals,” Babchenko was quickly shipped off to the Northern Caucasus, not long after the war there began. His introduction to the hells of war came in the form of having to drink corpse-tainted water—no surprise, however, given the way the corpses were piling up. As Babchenko notes, in a single engagement, the Battle of Grozny, nearly 5,000 Russians died, while the Chechen losses were beyond counting. The water was the least of his problems, for as a draftee he was regularly beaten and robbed, if less so than a Jewish comrade, “puny, cultured Zyuzik . . . [who] takes the beatings particularly badly…he still can’t get used to the fact that he is a non-person, a lowlife, a dumb animal, and every punch sends him into a depression.” Forced to raid civilians and each other for food, Babchenko’s unit lacked any visible structure. Weeks passed before he was even aware that he had a commanding officer, and all around him his fellow soldiers were being picked off by guerrillas or running away in the hope of making it alive to Russia again. “Even our lieutenant, who was called up for two years after he graduated from college, did a runner,” writes Babchenko. The indignities and ironies continued to mount. Only after they had been in combat for months did the army get around to issuing dog tags to identify the Russian dead, thin little pieces of aluminum that disintegrate in no time: “If you roast in a carrier they’ll just melt and no one will be able to identify you.” Consequently, there evolved a thriving black-market trade in iron dog tags—and pot, trying to score some of which leads Babchenko into a dangerous misadventure.
“War always smells the same—diesel oil and dust tinged with sadness,” Babchenko reflects. A harrowing, masterfully written tale that, like Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, bears promise of becoming a classic of modern war reportage.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1860-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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