A thoughtful, lucid, not-terribly-optimistic autobiography of a scholarly soldier.
Nagl, a career officer and leading advocate for the Army’s new counterinsurgency doctrine, delivers a lively memoir that combines battlefield experiences with military politics.
A West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar, the author studied international relations before commanding a tank platoon during the 1991 Gulf War. “The rest of the world had seen the ease with which America’s conventional military forces cut through the Iraqi military,” he writes. “They would have been crazy to fight us that way again.” Sadly, American military leaders hated their experience fighting the Viet Cong and continued to train forces to fight conventional, World War II–type campaigns. Nagl returned to Oxford, earning a doctorate with a thesis comparing how Britain and America handled insurgencies in Malaya and Vietnam. Deployed to Iraq in 2003, he describes his brutal education in the realities of counterinsurgency. His military writing and thesis—published in 2002 as Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife—earned him appointment as military assistant in the Department of Defense, where he joined a team led by Gen. David Petraeus, who wrote the landmark 2007 counterinsurgency field manual. Its enthusiastic reception did nothing for Nagl’s career, however, and he retired in 2008 to join the Center for a New America, an influential Washington think tank where he continues to speak out on security issues. Insurgents win when opponents grow tired of the struggle, he notes, and Americans are clearly in that category. “If Iraq was the midterm,” writes the author, “Afghanistan is the final exam. It’s a lot harder than the midterm.” Nagl warns that our lack of patience means that Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s futures remain uncertain—and readers will note that he wrote this book before the current meltdown in Iraq.
A thoughtful, lucid, not-terribly-optimistic autobiography of a scholarly soldier.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-498-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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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