A sometimes-touching recollection that is outclassed by similar efforts in the growing genre of military memoirs.
A memoir about a young soldier’s travails.
In his first book, the nameless author—he withholds nearly all names out of deference to privacy—recounts troubles that seemingly followed him his entire life. Born in Georgia, his family moved with his father’s military career, taking them to North Dakota and then Florida. His childhood was beleaguered from the beginning; being shy, overweight, and socially awkward left him chronically friendless. That alienation proved insufferable for him, and he was driven to attempt suicide. In high school, though, he joined ROTC, lost the extra pounds, and started to slowly develop a sense of purpose, which eventually led to a military career. Along the way, he met and married his first girlfriend, who, unfortunately, turned out to be another source of sadness for him. Cantankerous and unsupportive, she became pregnant with another man’s child while the author was in Iraq, and he finally divorced her. He threw himself into his work, eventually becoming a highly skilled combat engineer, and his job took him to Iraq, Jordan, and Germany. The same job took a psychological toll, however, and the stress swamped him. Once again, he flirted with notions of suicide, and he was diagnosed with PTSD, leading to his discharge from the military. An uplifting part of the author’s often grim tale is the commitment his new wife made to him despite his troubles—a heartening element of the remembrance. The book reads like a diary, breezily anecdotal and sometimes frustratingly self-pitying. And while the author acknowledges from the start that the book isn’t sufficiently proofed, the preponderance of grammatical errors do, in fact, undermine the clarity of the writing. The author, though, is to be commended for his candor—he is remarkably forthcoming about intensely personal foibles. Also, the self-effacing nature of the narrative can be endearing; the author gets drunk on his wedding night (to his second wife’s chagrin), and he calls himself out as a “class act jerk.” While the descriptions of his military service can be both edifying and harrowing, it’s unlikely this book will interest those who don’t know the author well.
A sometimes-touching recollection that is outclassed by similar efforts in the growing genre of military memoirs.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5120-3931-3
Page Count: 82
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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