Save your money.
The self-told story of a former U.S. Navy SEAL.
Divided into 11 chapters (six autobiographical followed by five fictionalized accounts of actual Navy SEAL missions), the book traces the footsteps of author Webb, a highly decorated U.S. Navy SEAL, from his summer jobs as a teenager aboard dive boats in Ventura, California, and the tumultuous relationship he shared with his father to his graduation from the Navy sniper school and the subsequent missions in which he served in Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. The act of war—shooting, bombing, spotting “terrorists”—is made to sound commonplace and is depicted very matter-of-factly, ad nauseam. The repetitive use of “terrorists” to describe enemy combatants in a country invaded by the United States is both inaccurate and reductive. Such statements as “the local people were good people” do nothing to mitigate this, and unsurprisingly, the nearly two-decades–long catastrophe that has been U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq goes unaddressed. Written, oddly, in the third person, presumably to fit the style of other books in the series, the narrative comes across as vainglorious and exceedingly self-serving, with the resulting haughtiness detracting from an authentic and credible depiction of Navy SEAL life.
Save your money. (Memoir/fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-11468-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Like oil itself, this is a book that needs to be handled with special care.
In 1977, the oil carrier Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil into a formerly pristine Alaskan ocean inlet, killing millions of birds, animals, and fish. Despite a cleanup, crude oil is still there.
The Winters foretold the destructive powers of the atomic bomb allusively in The Secret Project (2017), leaving the actuality to the backmatter. They make no such accommodations to young audiences in this disturbing book. From the dark front cover, on which oily blobs conceal a seabird, to the rescuer’s sad face on the back, the mother-son team emphasizes the disaster. A relatively easy-to-read and poetically heightened text introduces the situation. Oil is pumped from the Earth “all day long, all night long, / day after day, year after year” in “what had been unspoiled land, home to Native people // and thousands of caribou.” The scale of extraction is huge: There’s “a giant pipeline” leading to “enormous ships.” Then, crash. Rivers of oil gush out over three full-bleed wordless pages. Subsequent scenes show rocks, seabirds, and sea otters covered with oil. Finally, 30 years later, animals have returned to a cheerful scene. “But if you lift a rock… // oil / seeps / up.” For an adult reader, this is heartbreaking. How much more difficult might this be for an animal-loving child?
Like oil itself, this is a book that needs to be handled with special care. (author’s note, further reading) (Informational picture book. 9-12)Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-3077-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Essential.
A measured corrective to pervasive myths about what is often referred to as the “first Thanksgiving.”
Contextualizing them within a Native perspective, Newell (Passamaquoddy) touches on the all-too-familiar elements of the U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving and its origins and the history of English colonization in the territory now known as New England. In addition to the voyage and landfall of the Mayflower, readers learn about the Doctrine of Discovery that arrogated the lands of non-Christian peoples to European settlers; earlier encounters between the Indigenous peoples of the region and Europeans; and the Great Dying of 1616-1619, which emptied the village of Patuxet by 1620. Short, two- to six-page chapters alternate between the story of the English settlers and exploring the complex political makeup of the region and the culture, agriculture, and technology of the Wampanoag—all before covering the evolution of the holiday. Refreshingly, the lens Newell offers is a Native one, describing how the Wampanoag and other Native peoples received the English rather than the other way around. Key words ranging from estuary to discover are printed in boldface in the narrative and defined in a closing glossary. Nelson (a member of the Leech Lake Band of Minnesota Chippewa) contributes soft line-and-color illustrations of the proceedings. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Essential. (Nonfiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-72637-4
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Scholastic Nonfiction
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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