Timely, courageous and cautionary.
The incendiary insider’s story of a progressive-thinking war resister versus America’s unforgiving “military machine.”
Mejía, 31, seems to have inherited his rebellious nature from his Nicaraguan parents, both active in the Sandinista political resistance. Raised as a “privileged child of the revolution” after the Sandinistas took power in 1979, he faced a xenophobic Costa Rican society when his mother relocated there in 1992. School days were lonely and rough, so he wasn’t sorry to move to Miami at age 18 when his grandmother, a naturalized citizen, got him permanent resident status. He enlisted in the Army at 19 because the military would pay his college tuition after three years of active duty. Fulfilling his remaining five-year commitment with the National Guard, he was told he would be sent to war only in the instance of a “devastating attack” on the United States. So it was a shock when the military deployed him to Iraq in 2003. Mejía’s curiously dialogue-driven account of the war often strains credibility and ultimately grows tedious, though there’s descriptive skill present in his eye-opening guided tour through military life. That life worsened over time. On duty in ar Ramadi (central Iraq), he found his service hobbled by poor management direction, sandstorms, ambushes, relentlessly gruesome bloodshed, internal power politics and the increasing absence of basic human compassion. After eight months as a sergeant, guiding his squad through deadly terrain on defensive frontlines, Mejía went underground in the U.S. rather than return from a two-week leave. He surfaced in March 2004 to publicly denounce the war in Iraq and announce that he now refused to serve there. He was court-martialed and sent to jail for a year in a highly publicized trial that remains unresolved today. Mejía recounts this alarming story with a sophisticated mix of brio and prudence, hoping to revolutionize the restrictive military regime that imprisoned him.
Timely, courageous and cautionary.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59558-052-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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
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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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