Will appeal to military buffs and readers who enjoy precise, nuts-and-bolts description of battle action.
Competent collection relating the experiences of soldiers in America’s current wars.
Larson, who served in Iraq as a legal advisor, searched out 29 men decorated for valor and persuaded them to record their stories. Most begin with a short, lucid autobiography, followed by an account of their medal-winning deeds. All behaved valiantly, many receiving crippling injuries. Most of these stories appear to have been told repeatedly; details are more coherent on the page than they likely were on the battlefield, though a few accounts remain as confusing to the reader as they probably were to the participants. Several chapters recount Special Forces heroism in Afghanistan as soldiers rescued trapped colleagues or faced off against al-Qaeda in freezing winter atop the country’s daunting mountainous terrain. Half a dozen men fought valiantly against overwhelming odds during the March 2003 invasion of Iraq—invariably, it seems, against the “elite Republican Guard.” A medic achieved near-miracles of lifesaving in the midst of an ambush. A dozen medal-winners performed magnificently in brutal city battles or under ambush. Aware that the tape is running, these soldiers work hard to remain modest and share credit with their units. The author’s good judgment in sticking to oral history is confirmed by accounts of two Medal of Honor recipients who died under fire. Larson tells their stories through interviews with fellow soldiers and family members, whose avalanche of unrelenting praise makes these the least successful chapters. Readers searching for deeper understanding of these wars have picked the wrong book. The soldiers are quick to declare they are fighting for freedom. They love America. They also love the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and insist the feeling is mutual. American soldiers are “brave,” and the enemy is “fanatic,” generally made up of suicidal maniacs from outside the country.
Will appeal to military buffs and readers who enjoy precise, nuts-and-bolts description of battle action.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-451-22334-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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
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