A remarkable story told with modesty and grace.
Clear-eyed account of a youth devoted to service as a warrior and a humanitarian.
Greitens (Strength & Compassion: Photographs and Essays, 2008), founder of the veterans charity The Mission Continues, has achieved some impressive milestones, having been both a Rhodes Scholar and a Navy SEAL. Before that, however, he was an inquisitive and seemingly naive youngster, reading books about heroes and worrying he’d been born too late to have a meaningful life. In college at Duke, dissatisfied with his public-policy courses, he began to challenge himself, first by teaching English in China and then by studying boxing at a hardscrabble African-American gym. Intrigued by the art of forging human connections with those different from him, he found more disturbing experiences as a volunteer working with orphaned children in Bosnia and survivors of the Rwandan genocide. He became understandably convinced that “[i]f we really care about these people, we have to be willing to protect them from harm.” In 2001, the 26-year-old Greitens made the improbable transition from Oxford academics to Naval Officer Candidate School, then to the notoriously brutal SEAL training, with its 80 percent failure rate. Following the program’s vividly depicted “Hell Week,” Greitens was a newly minted SEAL when 9/11 occurred. The author served on secretive antiterrorist missions in Kenya, the Philippines and Afghanistan, and was ultimately wounded by a suicide car bomb in Iraq. Shortly after his last deployment, he learned of a close friend’s death in Iraq and channeled his grief (and considerable resourcefulness) into developing a charitable organization that helps wounded veterans restart their lives via participation in public-service organizations. The writing throughout is straightforward and effectively personalized, detailed yet unadorned; one would have to be mighty cynical to resist the power of Greitens’ experiences, and young Americans would benefit from contemplating his message.
A remarkable story told with modesty and grace.Pub Date: April 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-42485-9
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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