Though the writing lacks polish, readers interested in elite military forces could hardly ask for a more honest rendering.
A West Point graduate looks back on his training and experiences as a Green Beret.
What does it take to succeed as a member of the Army Special Forces? Author Wong (Yellow Green Beret Vol. II, 2012) found out when he attended West Point in the late 1990s and then set out to join the ultraelite Green Berets. After completing several years of arduous training, he achieved his goal and later earned two Bronze Stars for military service in places ranging from the Philippines to Iraq. In order to realize his aims, he had to meet challenges that included grueling physical education classes at West Point and navigating the U.S. Army bureaucracy. His book makes clear that the route to joining the Special Forces has no shortcuts and that dismissal from the program lurks around every corner, but the experience can bring unique rewards. Writing in a conversational tone, Wong describes the excitement of being an Asian-American in the military: “I stated who I was and that I was there to see Colonel King (cool name by the way—he’s a colonel, and he’s a king).” Although the breezy prose style at times works against a robust understanding of complex situations, the book offers a realistic look at a military institution romanticized by movies and other forms of popular culture. The author seems to have no agenda beyond the obvious: telling the story of a man who tried hard, failed many times but persevered even if the results didn’t always live up to expectations. The author and his comrades in arms spent years perfecting military tactics, at times only to face tedious PowerPoint presentations, indifferent authority figures and arbitrary rules instead of action. Peppered with information on the Iraq War and the U.S. involvement in the Philippines, this book leads an informative expedition into a much mythologized part of the military, headed by an author who’s never been afraid to fail.
Though the writing lacks polish, readers interested in elite military forces could hardly ask for a more honest rendering.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463529499
Page Count: 330
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
An ardent defense of storytelling.
Telling tales.
A prolific writer across a range of genres, Winterson examines the richness of One Thousand and One Nights to argue passionately for the power of imagination. Melding memoir, fiction, and cultural criticism, she pays homage to Shahrazad, consummate inventor of seductive tales, who enlightens her captor—and would-be executioner, the Sultan Shahryar—about the power of imagination. “Imagination is key,” Winterson writes. “To see past the present, with its assumptions and constraints. To see round corners.” Stories teach us about what it means to be human, including that being human “can mean appearing in other shapes and other forms.” Stories, as the author discovered in her own life, give us permission to break out of ill-fitting strictures. Growing up lesbian, an only child and adoptee in an ultrareligious evangelical home, she felt that she was “simultaneously hiding a true self and finding a true self.” In the library, she found liberation in fiction that gave her a chance to imagine “what it is like to be someone else” and to inhabit new worlds. “One of the things I love about fiction,” she writes, “is that we can—and do—escape our fate. A word of caution here. This may not mean the characters in the story.” Turning to Shahrazad’s stories, Winterson notes that recurring themes are “harm done to those who are innocent” and “failure to recognise what is valuable, and what is worthless.” What is worthless, according to her, is mind-numbing work and rampant consumerism, for which, she speculates, sentient AI may provide an escape, having no interest in material acquisitions: “The invisible, unfettered, unbounded, non-material life of the imagination, and what it invents, that is the basis of reality.”
An ardent defense of storytelling.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780802167118
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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