A cynical but unique viewpoint on the Iraq War.
Terse, detailed account of a no-nonsense cop’s time running interrogations in Iraq.
Former Marine and retired NYPD Intelligence Division sergeant Strom wrote this memoir with prolific authors Preisler and Benson, resulting in sometimes-workmanlike prose with an as-told-to feel. Still, Strom’s personality comes through as a tough, profane operator who transitioned into high-stakes military contracting as private projects were funded to address aspects of insurgent violence. Following his retirement in 2006, Strom was recruited by a military contractor for Phoenix, “a highly classified program by which law enforcement and military personnel, chosen for their varied yet complementary skills, would track down insurgent groups responsible for the roadside bombs that were killing our soldiers and marines and local civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Strom was initially enthusiastic, noting, “for the first time in many weeks I could feel my adrenal glands starting to pump.” During training at Fort Hood and elsewhere, he became frustrated by the slow pace of military operations, a frequent theme in the book. Finally deployed in 2008, he writes, “once in the Green Zone, the coalition’s occupied seat of control in central Baghdad, I realized the army guys viewed us as greedy, overpaid contractors.” Over time, however, Strom’s unit became integrated into the military’s operations during a tense period of the Iraq War, proving their worth in intelligence-gathering even as they were hamstrung by internal conflicts and regulations. Strom identifies soldiers, contractors, and Iraqis he admired, but he also castigates certain people for their professional or personal failings. “I’d like to think of myself as a guy who gets along with others,” he writes, “but I am also one who doesn’t suffer assholes lightly.” The narrative is saved from an overly generic feel by the in-depth focus on daily operations, which involved intricate planning and immediate response to attacks, with Strom leading interrogations. These set pieces capture his role as a weary urban cop–turned-warrior in a volatile, culturally challenging battle space.
A cynical but unique viewpoint on the Iraq War.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64160-102-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2019
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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