A gung-ho yarn of modern war that also clarifies the resilience of Afghanistan’s tribal culture.
Pulpy retelling of a notable Afghan war flash point from the perspective of the Pashtun tribesman who saved wounded Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell.
Prolific author Robinson (Honor and Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Navy SEALs Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"—and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured, 2013, etc.) previously co-authored Lone Survivor, made into a 2013 film, about Luttrell’s ordeal. Here, the author re-examines the fierce firefight against numerous Taliban fighters that claimed both Luttrell’s three peers and a helicopter-borne rescue mission via the story of Mohammed Gulab, based on interviews conducted via interpreter. Though the overall narrative is familiar, Robinson develops it via a lesser-known facet of the war: the fiercely independent mountain tribes that tried to avoid both Taliban and American entanglements. Gulab notes at the outset, “God spoke to me that day and said I must give protection to this man...under the Pashtunwali rules that guide our lives.” This decision surprised his village and Luttrell and infuriated the Taliban, resulting in a tense series of standoffs before a covert, high-tech rescue mission arrived for Luttrell and his unlikely protector. Remarkably, it took years for Luttrell, who credits the tribesman with saving his life, to find Gulab again. Robinson tries to rectify that by telling his story, emphasizing Gulab’s bravery, the respect accorded to his family by his tribe, and his credentials as a genuine warrior who started as a child soldier fighting the Soviet occupation—not to mention the fact that Gulab “liked this tall Special Forces operator a great deal more than he cared for the rough, sneering gangsters” of the Taliban. Robinson sincerely discusses the inscrutable, honor-bound, ancient Pashtun society and warrior code that guided Gulab. However, the book suffers from repetitive observation and a sometimes excessively macho tone (“It was as if everyone was involved in this rescue, if not physically, then with their fighting hearts and steel-rimmed willpower”).
A gung-ho yarn of modern war that also clarifies the resilience of Afghanistan’s tribal culture.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1798-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
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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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