Romesha ably captures the daily dangers faced by these courageous American soldiers in Afghanistan.
An account of the horrendous October 2009 attack on the American Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan, told in a frank, engaging vernacular by the staff sergeant and Medal of Honor winner.
The attack by the Taliban on Keating took the lives of eight Americans and countless Afghans, and it rendered numerous wounded. However, as Romesha notes in his character-driven narrative, it was hardly a surprise enemy move. Having joined the Army from his graduating class in Lake City, California, in 1999, following his two older brothers, Romesha became a commander of the Black Knight Troop’s Red Platoon, which was eventually sent to the most remote and dangerous outpost in Nuristan, less than 20 miles from the Pakistan border. The location of the fort defied tactical logic: rather than firing down at the enemy from the top of the hill, Keating was a target at the base of steep mountains whose ridgelines concealed attack points behind thick trees and boulders. It was the spectacularly ill-planned layout of the fort—“so breathtakingly open to plunging fire that massive amounts of artillery and airpower would be required to defend it”—that allowed the Taliban to observe in detail the movements and patterns of the American scouts, young men who were trained in reconnaissance, countersurveillance, and navigation. Romesha lovingly describes this cohort as “exceptionally ordinary men who were put to an extraordinary test.” The author devotes the narrative to building character studies of his troop, which he carefully “stacked” with the most determined, steely, physically fit, and battle-tested soldiers, headed by the very capable Lt. Andrew Bundermann. When the assault came at dawn, the soldiers took up their weapons and positions dutifully and with fervor, though they were stunningly outnumbered and nearly overrun until air support arrived hours later. The book is riveting in its authentic detail, right down to the determined attempts to recover American bodies before the Taliban could.
Romesha ably captures the daily dangers faced by these courageous American soldiers in Afghanistan.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95505-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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