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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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