First-person war stories served up by a participant in some of the most dangerous actions of the modern era.
A memoir by a Special Forces soldier whose career spans the period from the Iranian hostage crisis of the early 1980s to the post–9/11 Afghan campaigns.
Born in Iran, Lahidji grew up as a Muslim, though during his youth, the country was more modern and Western-oriented than in later years. After school, he moved to the U.S., where a relative owned a gas station, though he had to fulfill his military service before being allowed to leave Iran. In the U.S., deciding he wasn’t cut out for a business career, he reported to a recruiting office and asked to join the Green Berets. That was the start of a remarkable career, and his familiarity with the languages and culture of much of the Muslim world became prime assets. With the assistance of Pezzullo (co-author: Left of Boom: How a Young CIA Case Officer Penetrated the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, 2016, etc.), Lahidji spins yarns of being stranded in Tehran after the Carter administration’s attempt to rescue the hostages failed; getting a distant look at Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan; fighting his way out of Mogadishu during the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident; and surviving a helicopter crash when it was shot down in Afghanistan. Throughout, the author offers plenty of energetically told stories of some very hot spots, and he tells them with the uninhibited style of a frontline soldier. There’s not a great deal of depth or fresh insight, but this is the story of a soldier, not a diplomat or historian. Anyone who enjoys an unvarnished, ground-level view of America’s military doing its job will find plenty of what they’re looking for here.
First-person war stories served up by a participant in some of the most dangerous actions of the modern era.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12115-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2018
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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