An extremely poignant statement on human vulnerability and the devastation of war.
The brief yet highly courageous life of a gravely wounded Iraq War veteran.
Tomas Young, born in 1979 and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, had profound doubts about being shipped to fight in the Iraq War in April 2004. As U.S. Army veteran and author Wilkerson (Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend, 2009, etc.) points out in this straightforward, sympathetic account, Young believed that the United States should be targeting Afghanistan rather than Iraq, and he was appalled that his unit received no training on Iraq or its people. Still, he realized he had to go (the military “kind of own you at that point,” he recalled). Less than a week into his deployment in Sadr City, Iraq, on what was a spectacularly ill-organized and disastrous mission, the truck he was stuffed into came under ambush and was riddled with bullets, leaving many soldiers wounded, included Young, who suffered a severed spinal cord. He spent weeks at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and then months at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Louis—though it was clear that Young was paralyzed from the midtorso down and would need constant medical care for the rest of his life. His mother proved to be his solid support, as well as successive wives. Moreover, talk show host and anti-war activist Phil Donahue resolved to make a documentary on Young and his emerging activism in the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. The subsequent film, Body of War, co-directed by Ellen Spiro, was a critical but not commercial success, though it gained Young national support and attention. After nine years of living with his severe disability and all the accompanying ailments and distress, which Wilkerson delineates in detail here, Young was ready to take his own life—before he died quietly in his sleep on Nov. 10, 2014, at the age of 34.
An extremely poignant statement on human vulnerability and the devastation of war.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60846-650-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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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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