Long on heroism, short on analysis and critical acumen.
Veteran journalist Eubanks (To Win and Die in Dixie: The Birth of the Modern Golf Swing and the Mysterious Death of Its Creator, 2010, etc.) follows the careers of two young men: one a cadet at West Point, the other a midshipman at the Naval Academy, from 9/11 to the present.
This paean to patriotism and a fiercely focused definition of manhood and patriotism has all the subtlety of a Fourth of July parade or a halftime show on Veterans Day. The author gives us the backgrounds of his two principals (Chad at West Point, Brian at Annapolis), beginning with a moment in the 2001 Army-Navy game (played only months after 9/11), when linebacker Brian tackled quarterback Chad—their first meeting. Then Eubanks alternates the stories of the two, celebrating along the way the traditional virtues of manliness and patriotism that these two young men embody. To the author’s credit, we do get glimpses of the men’s warts. Brian survived a court martial for sexual assault against a female officer; Chad acted like a pig on spring break in Florida (though the author can’t quite bring himself to characterize it as such). Both eventually end up in Iraq; the author does not question America’s involvement but does celebrate the heroism of his principals, both of whom won—deservedly—battlefield honors. Eubanks also describes the love lives of each man, both of whom eventually left the military. Chad tried a few things before becoming an FBI agent, a position he eventually left for the private security sector; Brian became an accomplished cage fighter then segued into running his own fight-training enterprise. Along the way, the author revisits subsequent Army-Navy games and delivers some play-by-play—of action on the gridiron and on the streets of Fallujah.
Long on heroism, short on analysis and critical acumen.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-220280-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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