A cynical but unique viewpoint on the Iraq War.
Terse, detailed account of a no-nonsense cop’s time running interrogations in Iraq.
Former Marine and retired NYPD Intelligence Division sergeant Strom wrote this memoir with prolific authors Preisler and Benson, resulting in sometimes-workmanlike prose with an as-told-to feel. Still, Strom’s personality comes through as a tough, profane operator who transitioned into high-stakes military contracting as private projects were funded to address aspects of insurgent violence. Following his retirement in 2006, Strom was recruited by a military contractor for Phoenix, “a highly classified program by which law enforcement and military personnel, chosen for their varied yet complementary skills, would track down insurgent groups responsible for the roadside bombs that were killing our soldiers and marines and local civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Strom was initially enthusiastic, noting, “for the first time in many weeks I could feel my adrenal glands starting to pump.” During training at Fort Hood and elsewhere, he became frustrated by the slow pace of military operations, a frequent theme in the book. Finally deployed in 2008, he writes, “once in the Green Zone, the coalition’s occupied seat of control in central Baghdad, I realized the army guys viewed us as greedy, overpaid contractors.” Over time, however, Strom’s unit became integrated into the military’s operations during a tense period of the Iraq War, proving their worth in intelligence-gathering even as they were hamstrung by internal conflicts and regulations. Strom identifies soldiers, contractors, and Iraqis he admired, but he also castigates certain people for their professional or personal failings. “I’d like to think of myself as a guy who gets along with others,” he writes, “but I am also one who doesn’t suffer assholes lightly.” The narrative is saved from an overly generic feel by the in-depth focus on daily operations, which involved intricate planning and immediate response to attacks, with Strom leading interrogations. These set pieces capture his role as a weary urban cop–turned-warrior in a volatile, culturally challenging battle space.
A cynical but unique viewpoint on the Iraq War.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64160-102-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2019
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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