Military buffs will give this high marks; general readers may find it hard to relate to the author’s relentlessly macho...
Memoirs from members of Special Forces tend to mix combat fireworks with a leavening of modesty, but O’Neal, writing with veteran co-author Fisher (with Tom Coughlin: Earn the Right to Win, 2013, etc.), dispenses with the modesty at no great cost.
True to the traditions of the genre, the author passed a miserable childhood. At 15, he stole his cousin’s birth certificate and enlisted in the Army. Sent to Vietnam in 1967, he found his calling and fought enthusiastically until his deception came to light. Discharged, he re-enlisted under his real name, repeated his training, returned to Vietnam and soon joined the elite Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol units. After two years of grueling patrols and battles, he returned to the United States and Ranger School in 1971. With the war winding down, O’Neal served on elite parachuting teams and taught hand-to-hand combat before joining America’s first anti-terror unit. Yearning for action, he left the Army to train troops for Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, who was fighting Sandinista guerrillas. This produced action but ended disastrously in the death of O’Neal’s family, with O’Neal himself barely surviving capture and torture. In 1981, he returned to the Army to help organize its Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School. After retiring, he continued to train Special Forces in his aggressive techniques. His personal life was less happy. He undoubtedly suffered a chronic post-traumatic stress disorder and often abused drugs both for PTSD and the pain of his many injuries.
Military buffs will give this high marks; general readers may find it hard to relate to the author’s relentlessly macho ethos, but they will find it hard not to admire his fierce dedication.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00432-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
