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THE LONG WALK

Name: THE LONG WALK
Author: Brian Castner
ISBN: 978-0-385-53620-2

A STORY OF WAR AND THE LIFE THAT FOLLOWS

by Brian Castner ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 2012

Scarifying stuff, without any mawkishness or dumb machismo—not quite on the level of Jarhead, but absolutely worth reading.

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“The first thing you should know about me is that I’m Crazy.” So begins this affecting tale of a modern war and its home-front consequences.

The capitalization is deliberate, for by debut author and combat veteran Castner’s account, that Crazy is something like another person lying inside, more than a shadow within, something that can be neither stilled nor exorcised. The ordinary-Joe author found himself as a volunteer Army officer in Iraq—and not just a soldier, but one with the very special job of disarming bombs. It’s a business of acronyms, EFP (explosively formed projectile) being a particularly dreaded one. “EFP’s are real bad,” writes Castner. “They take off legs and heads, put holes in armor and engine blocks, and our bosses in Baghdad and Washington want every one we find.” Given that demand, a dangerous job becomes even more dangerous, and the “long walk”—the one an explosives disposal expert takes toward the bomb and the task of denaturing it—becomes ever longer. It’s an assembly-line sort of job, one of “stamping machines” and “broken widgets,” in which a single mistake means being vaporized. For Castner, there were no good days. Most days were a blend of boredom and terror, with some more terrifying than others, as with the “Day of Six VBIEDs”—i.e., six very nasty car bombs within 15 minutes. That’s the kind of thing that can wear on a person, to say nothing of the sound of small-arms fire, mortars, bombs and artillery. All of this fed the Crazy, whose “spidery fingers take the top of my head off to eat my brain and heart from the inside out every night.” And the Crazy turns out to be very real, on the way to the dread thing called TBI, traumatic brain injury, which all that exploding ordinance spawns just as surely as cigarette smoking gives way to emphysema.

Scarifying stuff, without any mawkishness or dumb machismo—not quite on the level of Jarhead, but absolutely worth reading.

Pub Date: July 10, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-385-53620-2

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 25, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
STAMPEDE
by Brian Castner

- BOOK REVIEW
DISAPPOINTMENT RIVER
by Brian Castner

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ROAD AHEAD
edited by Adrian Bonenberger & Brian Castner

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.