by Patrick Hennessey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 2010
An honest, graphic portrait of young men on the modern battlefield.
A young Oxford graduate’s tale of heat, boredom and adrenaline-rush warfare in Afghanistan.
Now in his late 20s, Hennessey became a captain in the Grenadier Guards at age 22 and soon learned to love combat and its “danger and…startling unpredictability.” His irreverent, nonstop narrative offers a revealing view of young British soldiers, many university-educated, all armed with iPods and video games, as they seek wartime glory and action. Telling girlfriends they’re off to hunt Osama bin Laden, they initially found themselves keeping tourists happy in London, maintaining the peace in the Balkans and fighting the desert heat in Iraq, where the author and his military-academy buddies launched their eponymous reading club. While sitting around in boxer shorts between shifts, they read fraying paperback editions of Catch-22, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy and other novels whose surreal aspects had striking immediacy in the strange otherness of war. Their reading—along with video games, the music of Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley and much-needed Facebook fixes—provided a respite between patrols and eventual firefights with “Terry,” the enemy, first in Baghdad and then, in 2007, amid sandstorms and head-high poppies in Afghanistan. Relating much of his story in e-mails, Hennessey captures the fear and excitement of combat, celebrating “just how easy it all was, how natural it all felt and how much fun,” even as he grieved over the deaths of comrades. Though the frequent use of acronyms and British slang may put off some American readers, the author offers numerous vivid snapshots of his experiences—watching Band of Brothers and Gladiator to learn combat techniques; giant platoon snowball fights in Bosnia; a debate on the best iPod music for their first mission (they select Metallica); futile attempts to train undisciplined troops of the Afghan National Army who couldn’t shape their berets, couldn’t hit targets with their rusted or broken AK-47s and wore whatever they wanted; and the Bangladeshi Pizza Hut workers’ continuing delivery of pies during mortar attacks on a logistics base in Iraq.
An honest, graphic portrait of young men on the modern battlefield.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59448-479-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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