A courageous breaking of the code of silence to seek mental health for veterans and the war-scarred.
The story of the friendship between an embedded photographer in Afghanistan and a Marine who was wounded in an ambush explosion in 2010.
In this poignant memoir penned in alternating points of view by two very different participants in America’s war in Afghanistan, the authors achieve a shared sense of emotional and physical trauma. O’Reilly, a photojournalist who has spent more than a decade in the most dangerous hot spots on the planet, from Africa to Helmand Province, and Brennan, a Marine squad leader on deployment in Afghanistan, met during that horrific Taliban attack in 2010. O’Reilly took pictures of a wounded Brennan and put them on a web link, to the alarm of his parents, who did not know what was going on. Ultimately, the two “misfits” would meet again in America over their shared suffering from long-running PTSD. After his many deployments and injuries, Brennan suffered from serious concussions, although he preferred to lie about the symptoms rather than reveal the extent of his injuries; O’Reilly, stationed in war zones in Africa and elsewhere, was in denial about his emotional instability. Both men ultimately sought professional help, though for Brennan, it was particularly arduous and painful; even asking for help as a Marine branded him as a “pussy” and lowered his stature with his squad. Nonetheless, the plethora of suicides among his acquaintances and his own bewilderment propelled him to change his career to being a journalist chronicling veterans’ concerns. O’Reilly, on the other hand, had to fight feelings of being “predatory and repulsive” in shooting and publishing scenes of violence. Ultimately, the authors effectively reveal how they moved beyond the “fog of war” and forged a new life after the trauma.
A courageous breaking of the code of silence to seek mental health for veterans and the war-scarred.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56254-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
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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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