Take his word for it: “War’s a bitch, wear a helmet.”
Staccato account of infantry combat in Iraq.
In November 2004, Army staff sergeant Bellavia led his men into the chaotic urban fighting described here. They were part of the successful recapture of Fallujah, a command base for Iraqi insurgents. Months earlier, the burnt corpses of four American contractors had been hung from a bridge in the same city. Written with military historian Bruning (The Devil’s Sandbox, 2006, etc.), this rapid-fire recreation of the block-by-block fighting captures perfectly the horror—and horrible peak-experience attraction—of war. In an era of high-tech weaponry, Bellavia puts us on the ground with modern-day grunts who could just as easily be fighting in World War II in Europe. They are filthy, hot, tired and dehydrated as they slog through rubble, broken glass and dead bodies to conduct risky searches of houses that may be “clean” or filled with booby traps and enemy soldiers. The frantic, present-tense narrative abounds with scenes and dialogue that make this account of battle read like a realistic war novel. Bellavia emphasizes the close bonds among disparate comrades, including Lance Ohle, master of the light machine gun, who talks like a gangsta rapper; Piotr Sucholas, the Michael Moore–loving liberal with ice water for blood; and Bryan Lockwald, the guitar-playing intellectual with wire-rimmed glasses and a handlebar mustache. The men enter homes through holes blown into walls by tanks, work their way to rooftops and engage a resourceful enemy, one of whom the author knifes to death in vicious hand-to-hand combat. Discharged in 2005, Bellavia finds he misses the feeling of importance and usefulness he derived from combat, returns to Iraq briefly as a Weekly Standard journalist, then comes home to try to repair strained relations with his wife and son.
Take his word for it: “War’s a bitch, wear a helmet.”Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7471-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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
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
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