An outstanding narrative about a single unit’s harrowing experiences in the “forever war.”
An urgent account of a parachute infantry regiment in Afghanistan.
Most books about the war in Afghanistan end grimly, and this one more than most, but readers will find it impossible to put down. Wall Street Journal Midwest correspondent Kesling, a former Marine officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, follows Bravo Company of the elite 82nd Airborne Division, already experienced from earlier tours, on their 2009 deployment. The author delivers vivid biographies of a dozen soldiers who “grew up as kids playing Army in the woods…waiting for the day they could enlist and head off to boot camp. They watched movies like Full Metal Jacket and The Green Berets and hagiographic tales of manly heroism.” During their deployment, Bravo soldiers ventured into the Arghandab Valley, an extremely dangerous area where a previous unit had stopped patrolling, “tired of getting fucked up by Taliban bombs.” Kesling delivers a gripping, detailed, nuts-and-bolt account of their ordeal. Only three men died, but a dozen “lost at least one limb,” and half the company received Purple Hearts. Most unnervingly, they almost never saw the enemy, who kept out of sight but planted hundreds, perhaps thousands, of improvised explosive devices often undetectable by minesweepers. Patrolling was a nightmare in which soldiers carefully walked in the footsteps of the man in front, a difficult tactic to maintain. Kesling devotes more than the usual space to his subjects’ lives after returning home, similar to David Finkel’s approach in Thank You for Your Service. “In the decade since,” writes Kesling, “two men killed themselves…more than a dozen made attempts and others admit they have seriously considered it.” Slowly but with some success, the government, concerned citizens, and even the soldiers themselves began to address the often crippling physical, mental, and emotional consequences of their deployment.
An outstanding narrative about a single unit’s harrowing experiences in the “forever war.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5115-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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