A generic addition to the crowded shelf of post-9/11 special-ops memoirs.
Gung-ho account of a sniper's time in Afghanistan, focused on "the thrill, the rush, the smell of gunpowder in combat."
Raised in a military family, Irving felt destined for service at a high level, becoming an Army Ranger at age 22. His perspective is unabashedly adolescent, portraying combat like a giant video game and entranced by the rituals and comradeship of men under arms. As with other recent books, Irving—writing with Brozek (co-author: The Hurt Artist: My Journey From Suicidal Junkie to Ironman, 2014, etc.)—is adept at discussing the uncompromising minutiae of weapons, tactics and battle staging, the lifeblood of the elite sniper fraternity. He portrays several action-packed missions during a 2009 deployment to Afghanistan, pursuing suicide-vest makers and other high-value Taliban targets in both rural and urban environments. During one grueling daylong firefight, Irving killed so many Taliban that his awed comrades bestowed upon him the titular nickname. Irving would ultimately claim 33 confirmed kills, evoking jealousy in his fellow snipers, described as having been "itching for some trigger time.” Given that the snipers are essentially tasked with shooting any armed military-age males they encounter, this pervasive machismo gives the narrative an unsavory (albeit unsurprising) subtext, especially since Irving rarely considers the larger political narrative of counterterrorism and the Afghanistan War. Despite his enthusiasm, by the end of the deployment, "all I could think of was that I wanted to get the hell out of that country and go home.” Though flattered by his formidable reputation as “this ‘little guy’ who was on a crazy roll racking up kills,” the hostility of Afghan civilians and the injuries suffered by his friends led him "to question why we were putting in so much blood, sweat, and tears in a place where people didn't seem to want our help."
A generic addition to the crowded shelf of post-9/11 special-ops memoirs.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1250045447
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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