A fast-paced account quite likely to engender strong reactions among readers concerned with the U.S. military’s roles in...
A war memoir from a highly decorated Navy SEAL.
The news flash from this book by retired SEAL O’Neill is that he fired the bullets that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. However, the shooting does not occur until more than 300 pages in; the narrative consists of much more than the sensational account of what happened on the top-secret mission to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Some passages are redacted due to review of the manuscript by U.S. Department of Defense Prepublication and Security Review personnel. In addition, O’Neill disguises the identities of more than a dozen individuals. As a result, judging the accuracy of the sensitive, war-related information presents difficulties, especially in light of previously published information about the bin Laden mission. (The author does not mention the controversial book No Easy Day by fellow SEAL Matt Bissonnette, who wrote using the pen name Mark Owen.) Whatever controversy might ensue, most of the memoir is enlightening about military special forces, especially the SEAL component. Born in 1976 and reared in Butte, Montana, O’Neill enlisted in the Navy in 1995 with the goal of becoming a SEAL. He understood the rigorous training, and he knew the washout rate was high, but he persisted, overcoming months of physical and mental rigor. The author had his first deployment in 1998 and went on to participate in top-secret assignments in Afghanistan and Iraq in addition to battling Somali pirates. Zealously patriotic, O’Neill seems to have never seriously questioned the motivations or consequences of his missions. During his time as a SEAL, O’Neill married and became a father, and he discusses the havoc caused by his military assignments regarding his family life.
A fast-paced account quite likely to engender strong reactions among readers concerned with the U.S. military’s roles in foreign conflicts.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4503-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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