Relentlessly bleak and extremely depressing.
Canadian-born and California-raised Cohen describes his work with the Israeli group Sayeret Duvdevan in this you-are-there debut memoir.
The author went on his first mission as a member of this elite counterterrorism unit in March 1996. The investigation of an explosion at Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Mall was the first of many bloody crime scenes (“battlefield scenes,” he calls them) Cohen had to deal with, but that was the life he chose when he moved to Israel to protect his people. He brings us into the shadowy world of Sayeret Duvdevan, offering details of his missions and his training, throwing in some contemporary and historical context, introducing us to his comrades-in-arms and delivering numerous gory anecdotes. At times Cohen comes off as stridently militant. “I recognize that what I’ve written here may sound unduly harsh, pro-militaristic, even anti-Arab in places,” he writes in an epilogue, “but I am writing this not as a propagandist but as a pragmatist.” This acknowledgement doesn’t make his attitude any less jarring, though it’s obviously hard to be objective in such violently graphic descriptions: slipping in a pool of blood at the scene of a suicide bombing, looking at a soldier who’s had one leg blown off and will probably bleed to death before medical help arrives. Cohen’s book contains an inherent contradiction. He paints himself as a lover of his God, his family and his country, an idealist who wants to do the right thing, but he displays throughout a streak of fanaticism that is clearly a prerequisite for membership in the Sayeret Duvdevan. Readers in less-extreme circumstances may find his attitude difficult to appreciate.
Relentlessly bleak and extremely depressing.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-123615-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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