One can hardly imagine a finer boots-on-the-ground chronicle of this open-ended conflict, no matter how long it may last.
From the front lines in the war on terror, a former Marine captain’s lucid account of his transformation from privileged college student to fighter in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Fick, now a student at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government, intended to go to med school until flunking a chemistry class at Dartmouth persuaded him to major in classics. Feeling insufficiently challenged by both academics and athletics, he gravitated toward Officer Candidate School for an experience he hoped would be “more transformative. Something that might kill me—or leave me better, stronger, and more capable.” He gets it. A grueling summer of training is a mere prelude to more elite challenges, where Fick’s teachers push him past the point of consciousness, instruct him on how to suppress panic, avoid capture and resist torture. Eventually, he makes it to Recon, the Marines’ special operations force. To Fick’s credit, these sections are every bit as compelling as his recollections of putting his training into practice, whether in Afghanistan just weeks after 9/11, where he helped recover a downed Black Hawk helicopter, or Iraq, where on his order—“Light him up!”—his platoon fired on vehicles speeding toward them. Quoting Plutarch and Thucydides, Fick’s memoir is steeped in duty, honor and tradition. Moreover, his commitment to the soldiers in his charge is unwavering: He took 65 men to war and brought them all back. Sure to be compared to Anthony Swofford’s profane, self-loathing Jarhead, Fick’s account puts the Marines in a vastly more flattering light. Far more than a glory-soaked collection of war stories, this memoir proves the ideal of the scholar-soldier as alive and well.
One can hardly imagine a finer boots-on-the-ground chronicle of this open-ended conflict, no matter how long it may last.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-55613-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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
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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