by Rob Maylor with Robert Macklin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 6, 2011
A satisfying stream of travel, training, horseplay and nuts-and-bolts military minutiae along with the usual fireworks.
Another macho memoir of a special-forces badass but with a charming, mildly exotic British overlay.
Following the convention of military memoirs, Maylor, with the assistance of Macklin (My Favourite Teacher, 2011, etc.) describes an aimless youth (bored at school, heavy drinking, etc.) before he found himself after joining the marines in 1992. These were Royal Marine commandos, so readers will encounter the traditional sadistic training regimen designed to select those able to endure extreme pain, exhaustion and humiliation. Peacetime warriors kill few bad guys, but Maylor toured the world, enduring surprisingly grueling exercises from the arctic to the jungle, plus unpleasant tours in Northern Ireland before joining the snipers in 1995; military buffs will enjoy his description of their highly technical instruction. After years with no action in sight, he quit the service, married, returned to his native New Zealand, found earning a living difficult and joined the Australian army, where he repeated sniper training. The book is well past the midpoint when his unit arrives in Afghanistan, but it is worth the wait as the author paints a vivid picture of the experience during which his unit patrolled, fought and sniped with varying degrees of success until it was ambushed in one of the biggest battles involving Australian troops. Sticking to his role as a soldier, Maylor shows mild sympathy for Afghan civilians, no hatred of the Taliban, love for his comrades, satisfaction with his performance and no claim that he was fighting for a noble goal.
A satisfying stream of travel, training, horseplay and nuts-and-bolts military minutiae along with the usual fireworks.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-64541-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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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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