War is hell, and hell is other people. In this serviceable account, Edmonds assures us that both adages are true.
Sometimes-harrowing memoir of time spent on the battleground in Iraq and its psychic consequences.
Most of the literature of the Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures has come from enlisted personnel, who bear the lion’s share of the fight. This memoir is unusual in that it comes from a high-ranking officer, just two grades down from general, deployed in the field in the dreadful year of 2005. It also comes from an officer who, since he was attached to an Iraqi unit as an adviser, did not have to observe all the niceties of war. Edmonds participated in numerous interrogation sessions, and the longer he did so, he writes, “the less certain and more conflicted I became about the right and wrong of everything.” The lessons he learned—some of which he imparts here—about how to grill a prisoner effectively are downright chilling. He recounts, for example, an Iraqi officer, late of Saddam Hussein’s army, telling him that the key is to be alternately frightening and friendly: “Going from comfort to terror to comfort, then terror, over and over again; soon even the strongest will give in.” Adding to his alienation was a girlfriend back home who wasn’t providing all the moral support she might. Adrift without an anchor and increasingly unsold on the mission—as he writes, “I hate it when Iraqis ask me to account for the shit that other Americans do”—Edmonds sank into the depression and emotional maelstrom of PTSD. Though he survived combat, the author leaves readers with the certainty that he will never again be who he once was. The narrative is a blend of rhetorical questions, staccato dialogue, and plaintive observations. Edmonds doesn’t reach the depth attained in recent books by Ben Fountain, Phil Klay, or Michael Pitre, but he does provide a useful adjunct to the work on PTSD done by Jonathan Shay and other writers and analysts.
War is hell, and hell is other people. In this serviceable account, Edmonds assures us that both adages are true.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-774-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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