Will appeal to fans of unapologetically brutal military writing.
Gritty combat memoir by an elite British sniper.
Harrison’s memoir focuses on the technical aspects of high-level gunfighting, as battle-tested during his multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. He opens with a tense encounter in Afghanistan, setting up the shot that would earn a world record for a long-distance kill, then downshifts into recounting his hardscrabble, dreary childhood. Things pick up for Harrison and readers when he signs on at age 16 with the British Household Cavalry. He learned about the ugly realities of war during a posting in the Balkans, where he bore witness to Serbian war crimes, and then a tour of Iraq that “had come close to breaking me.” Instead, in 2006, he pestered his way into sniper school: “I just kept asking—literally for years—until I ground them down.” As in the United States, the training is grueling, yet Harrison persevered, winning top student. His new skills served him well in 2007, he notes, when “I was back for another tour in the shithole that was Iraq.” Promoted to command after his first Afghanistan tour, the author documents frequent ambushes and grisly combat tableaux in both theaters: “There wasn’t much logic or background explained to us. We were like ‘rent-a-muscle.’ ” He notes that a certain coldbloodedness is essential for the sniper: “Due to the magnification of the scope, you do tend to see the person you are about to shoot.” Even after being wounded by an IED, Harrison was returned for combat to Afghanistan. He excels at capturing the nitty-gritty of being an operating high-end combat sniper, ably discussing equipment, optics, shooting theory, and stalking tactics. Seeing the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts through the eyes of a British soldier also helps the book stand out. Otherwise, a sense of the author’s inner life does not really develop beyond the laconic conservatism one might expect.
Will appeal to fans of unapologetically brutal military writing.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08523-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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