by Herb Eash ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 2006
Rough-around-the-edges tale that achieves an authenticity more polished authors struggle to duplicate.
An unwelcome tour of duty inspires this garbled but genuine chronicle of a soldier during the Gulf War.
At the time of Iraq’s fateful invasion of Kuwait, Eash was only 19 years old and unwittingly on the brink of a bizarre coming-of-age when he is called to war. Whether recounting tales of chasing women South of the Border from his Texas base or reminiscing about epic scorpion-versus-beetle battles in the Saudi Arabian desert, the youth and inexperience of the author and his fellow Army recruits is tragically clear throughout the narrative. Despite being couched in a grammatical minefield, Eash’s account becomes an unselfconscious Everyman’s portrait of the war. Without the pretensions of a hero’s tale or intellectual jabs at the absurdity of human conflict, he fills his story with authentic details: hole-digging competitions to pass time in the desert, punishments meted out for leaving his post (even to aid a crashed helicopter) and uneasiness around the international media covering his battalion’s first entry into Iraq. The emotions, if ineloquently stated, are raw and run the gamut of rage: anger at being separated from his new wife, horror of his first killings and frustration over Iraq’s unwillingness to negotiate. Eash is flooded with relief upon learning he will go home, but it’s a comfort shot through with incredulity that the U.S. government would denounce Saddam Hussein’s atrocities but leave the dictator in power. To appreciate this soldier’s story, the reader needs to turn a blind eye to the glaring flaws in his writing. Not a page goes by without tangents rife with distrust of the military’s top brass, platitudes, trite life advice or political diatribes (Eash makes no secret of his anti-illegal immigration and pro-legalized marijuana platform). But the rhetorical style, however inexpert, opens a window into a segment of American society often dramatized by the press, romanticized by politicians or demonized by pacifists that rarely finds its own voice.
Rough-around-the-edges tale that achieves an authenticity more polished authors struggle to duplicate.Pub Date: July 10, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-84728-202-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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