Readers interested in care programs for returning veterans will find Day’s account invaluable.
A Navy SEAL recounts a career of service and recovery from terrible wounds.
In 2007, Day was involved in an operation designed to track down and neutralize a terrorist cell in Iraq’s Anbar Province. He entered a room where four guns were trained on him, receiving 27 wounds—and still managed to kill all four shooters. Some of his memoir is by-the-numbers—it’s no surprise to learn that SEALs undergo training that would send most people packing—and some of the narrative is a touch overwritten—as when he writes of that critical moment: “It was surreal, like something out of a movie: time slowed almost to a stop and everything happened in super slow motion, almost as if I were watching the scene unfold frame by frame.” Each of Day’s 27 wounds was, in the words of the doctors who treated him, “perfect”—that is, each entered and exited from his body without hitting a vein, artery, or vital organ, making treatment possible. “Not one of the bullets, or the combination of them all, was enough to kill me,” he writes. Still, Day, who entered the service bearing the psychic wounds of an abusive childhood, suffered PTSD in the aftermath. Separated from the service, he spent time casting about for something to do before settling on a course of care for his fellow veterans and trauma sufferers, working both as a motivational speaker and a guide through the organization he founded called the Warrior Tribe, which provides “resiliency programming” for those who have undergone similar terrors to his. The author’s account of his recovery is inspiring indeed, a matter of tough love, persistence, and an ethic borrowed in part from Mr. Rogers: “If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet….”
Readers interested in care programs for returning veterans will find Day’s account invaluable.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-0183-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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