Readers interested in the essential work of military special forces will be inspired by McRaven’s adventures.
A retired four-star admiral serves up a readable memoir that’s long on blood and guts—including those of Osama bin Laden.
McRaven (Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...And Maybe the World, 2017) grew up a military brat—and a Texan when his father was sent to San Antonio after suffering a mild stroke (“something to do with cigarettes and Jim Beam whiskey, the doctor would say”). He also grew up in the 1960s under the influence of James Bond movies and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., all of which would come into play when the young Navy ensign applied to become a SEAL, “reportedly the toughest physical training in the entire military.” Certainly the drill instructors worked McRaven hard; of an entering class of 155, he writes, only 33 completed training and became SEALs. He himself would serve longer than any other SEAL, rising to become the commander of the entire U.S. Special Operations Forces. His book is anecdotal but without many surprises for anyone with military experience, but his account of finding and killing bin Laden is one of the best in the literature, told from the eagle’s-eye viewpoint of one who oversaw the entire operation. There his story shines, full of twists and turns ranging from the politics of the military’s engagement with the intelligence community (“those CIA officers who disliked SOF the most seemed to be our staunchest supporters”) to confirming that it was indeed bin Laden the SEALs and other special ops troops had killed. (McRaven recounts ordering a 6-foot-2 SEAL to lie next to the corpse of the 6-foot-4 bin Laden to be sure that they’d gotten the right guy.) It’s a story with many heroes but of cold professionalism as well; as the author tells it, “I had no sense of relief, no internal exhilaration, no feeling of victory,” not until his men were safely home.
Readers interested in the essential work of military special forces will be inspired by McRaven’s adventures.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-2974-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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