by Chuck Pfarrer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 6, 2004
Frank, well-written, and memorable. A companion to Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead as a warts-and-all, unromantic look at life...
An eye-widening, fascinating memoir of a young man’s sentimental education in the fine arts of infiltrating “denied areas,” blowing things up, slashing a few throats, and otherwise visiting mayhem on the bad guys.
Now a Hollywood screenwriter (The Jackal, Hard Target, and, of course, Navy SEALS), 40-something Pfarrer had the usual longhaired, dope-smoking, misspent youth of the ’70s. When his Navy officer dad exiled him to military school, he became born-again tough, and, after trying his hand at civilian life, decided to sign up for the service with the demand that he be put on a SEAL team. For his sins, he got the assignment, enduring training meant to weed out all but a small percentage of applicants. Those who survive spend the rest of their careers being constantly tested, evaluated, and sent into dangerous places. Pfarrer explains that SEALs are something like the Army’s Green Berets—only, of course, tougher and better in every way—but far fewer in number: “although the exact number of SEALs operational at any one time is classified,” he gamely writes, “I can say that our organization is considerably smaller than the Hells Angels.” (Later he writes that the total number of SEALs to have served since WWII is under 10,000.) The operations Pfarrer participated in and here describes are certainly hair-raising, whether storming the airplane carrying the Palestinian hijackers of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro (and nearly provoking a firefight with Italian troops in the bargain) or working behind the lines in “Wallyworld,” slang for Lebanon, where, he writes, “we took what pleasure we could in not being shelled every day.” Pfarrer writes proudly but without false bravado, even as he admits that he feels no guilt for having killed. “There are some people,” he grimly notes, “who need to go to hell and stay there.”
Frank, well-written, and memorable. A companion to Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead as a warts-and-all, unromantic look at life under arms.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6036-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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