Frank, well-written, and memorable. A companion to Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead as a warts-and-all, unromantic look at life...
An eye-widening, fascinating memoir of a young man’s sentimental education in the fine arts of infiltrating “denied areas,” blowing things up, slashing a few throats, and otherwise visiting mayhem on the bad guys.
Now a Hollywood screenwriter (The Jackal, Hard Target, and, of course, Navy SEALS), 40-something Pfarrer had the usual longhaired, dope-smoking, misspent youth of the ’70s. When his Navy officer dad exiled him to military school, he became born-again tough, and, after trying his hand at civilian life, decided to sign up for the service with the demand that he be put on a SEAL team. For his sins, he got the assignment, enduring training meant to weed out all but a small percentage of applicants. Those who survive spend the rest of their careers being constantly tested, evaluated, and sent into dangerous places. Pfarrer explains that SEALs are something like the Army’s Green Berets—only, of course, tougher and better in every way—but far fewer in number: “although the exact number of SEALs operational at any one time is classified,” he gamely writes, “I can say that our organization is considerably smaller than the Hells Angels.” (Later he writes that the total number of SEALs to have served since WWII is under 10,000.) The operations Pfarrer participated in and here describes are certainly hair-raising, whether storming the airplane carrying the Palestinian hijackers of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro (and nearly provoking a firefight with Italian troops in the bargain) or working behind the lines in “Wallyworld,” slang for Lebanon, where, he writes, “we took what pleasure we could in not being shelled every day.” Pfarrer writes proudly but without false bravado, even as he admits that he feels no guilt for having killed. “There are some people,” he grimly notes, “who need to go to hell and stay there.”
Frank, well-written, and memorable. A companion to Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead as a warts-and-all, unromantic look at life under arms.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6036-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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