A unique attack on the war by an author who comes across as a genuine idealist.
The first Iraq War veteran elected to Congress turns out to be an intelligent observer who hated what he saw and decided to do something about it.
Raised in a blue-collar Philadelphia family, Murphy pulled himself together after a misspent youth, joined the Army ROTC, attended Widener University School of Law and became the youngest professor at West Point. Teaching law to senior cadets, he stressed that no American is too powerful to be above the law—or to decide that someone else doesn’t deserve its protection. As examples, he maintains that both the army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule on homosexuality and the Bush administration’s policy of denying prisoners protection under the Geneva Convention fall below American standards of justice. Despite his position in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, Murphy was a gung-ho soldier who underwent paratrooper training and joined the 82nd Airborne Division. Transferring to Iraq in 2003, he witnessed the chaos that ensued when the United States destroyed the infrastructure, dismissed Saddam Hussein’s officials and disbanded his army. Readers will share Murphy’s amazement at discovering the absence of a plan for following up the victory. There were far too few soldiers in the occupying force, and they were disgracefully ill-equipped for fighting an insurgency. Billions in reconstruction money, dispensed by American contractors to Iraqi subcontractors, vanished without a trace. Writing about the 82nd Airborne, the author has nothing but praise for its members, who sacrificed and sometimes died to bring security and honest government to their area despite clueless civilian superiors. He left the service, returned home and, in 2005, decided to run for Congress as a critic of the war. The book’s final third delivers a nuts-and-bolts account of his campaign, an uphill struggle in a conservative district against a ruthless, well-financed incumbent.
A unique attack on the war by an author who comes across as a genuine idealist.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8695-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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