An inspiring book about heroism and sacrifice.
A French immigrant and U.S. Army captain tells the story behind the remarkable act of bravery that earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Son of an American father and an Algerian mother, Groberg lived in Europe until he was 12. His uncle Abdou, whom the author would visit on trips to Algeria, exerted an especially strong influence on him. A witness to the Franco-Algerian War, Abdou taught the boy that “freedom ha[d] to be earned” even if it meant risking one’s life. When the author's family immigrated to the United States, Abdou joined the Algerian army to combat a radical Islamist organization, the Groupe Islamique Armé, and died in the line of duty. Vowing to be part of the anti-terrorist solution, the author enlisted in the Army after graduating from college. He began the officer training that ended with a difficult but ultimately successful stint at Ranger School. His first deployment was to the Pech River Valley in Afghanistan, “the most dangerous place on earth.” There, he came face to face with his own greenness as a platoon leader and saw firsthand the way war changed both the men he led and the Afghanis he encountered. A second deployment followed a year and half later, this time as a personal security detachment commander. During one outing of U.S. and Afghani VIPs, Groberg spotted a suicide bomber walking nearby. He sprinted toward the man and pushed him away from the delegation. In the explosion that followed, four men—three of whom were Groberg’s friends—died. The author sustained career-ending injuries and a soul-crushing case of survivor’s guilt that nearly destroyed him. In this short, candid book, Groberg—with the assistance of Sileo (co-author: Fire in My Eyes: An American Warrior’s Journey from Being Blinded on the Battlefield to Gold Medal Victory, 2014, etc.)—offers insight into the profound sense of duty that drives members of the military while celebrating one man’s extraordinary courage.
An inspiring book about heroism and sacrifice.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6588-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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