This aggressively written account of frontline combat, with plenty of action and technical nitty-gritty, should appeal to...
Memoir of America’s most prolific sniper, with an emphasis on the grisly, unpredictable nature of contemporary warfare.
With more than 250 confirmed kills in Iraq and several citations for bravery, including two Silver Stars, Kyle may well be the “most lethal” soldier in American military history. Fortunately, this memoir (written with co-authors Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice) takes a more unassuming and approachable tone in narrating his improbable journey from a modest Texas childhood to becoming a sniper with SEAL Team 3 and serving four deployments in Iraq: “my so-called ‘legend’ [has] a lot to do with luck.” As with other recent books about the SEALs, they are depicted as a breed apart: hyper-competitive, with the most intense training, hazing and bonding rituals (the latter involving much drinking and fighting). Kyle is unapologetic about his own conservative persona, and perhaps not the ideal spokesman for military public relations. The highlights of the narrative are the grim yet often funny accounts of Kyle’s violent battles all over Iraq, most of which are described crisply. The author describes his participation in numerous urban battles, such as the protracted struggles for Ramadi and Fallujah, and asserts that elite operators like himself contributed to Iraq’s evolving stability—“it took violence of action to create a situation where there could be peace.” Kyle provides a few surprising moments, as when he writes eloquently about his fellow veterans, including SEALs killed or wounded in battle. “There’s no reason someone who has fought for their country should be homeless or jobless,” he writes. Kyle’s wife offers her counterpoint narrative in italicized passages, driving home the surreal life of difficulty bestowed on professional warriors’ loved ones.
This aggressively written account of frontline combat, with plenty of action and technical nitty-gritty, should appeal to conservative readers and military buffs.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-208237-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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