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
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
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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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