Despite the absence of insights, an entertaining life of a member in good standing of a highly elite band of brothers.
As-told-to autobiography of a member of the Navy’s elite SEAL special-force unit.
Joining the Navy in 1977 after six years as a paratrooper, Chalker quickly volunteered for the SEALs and sailed through the brutal training program. (Besides acquiring the vicious combat skills of other elite groups like the Green Berets, Rangers, and Commandos, SEALs also swim, sail, and dive; being cold and wet is a matter of pride.) Then he volunteered for an even more elite and secret antiterrorism SEAL unit, where he remained until he retired 20 years later. His unit participated in the Granada invasion and secret actions in the Middle East, but inevitably most of Chalker’s experience took place during peacetime: exercises followed by more exercises intermixed with Navy politics, interactions with colleagues in the unit, and a great deal of after-hours drinking and brawling. Deaths and injuries were not rare during both exercises and off-duty horseplay. Despite the lack of world-shaking events, Chalker’s life makes good reading. Military buffs will enjoy the nuts-and-bolts description of weaponry, gear, and tactics required for each special action. Many exercises—simulated hijackings, hostage rescues, or attacks on ships, docks, barracks, or offshore oil platforms—are surprisingly exciting even in the absence of an enemy; plenty of things go wrong in either case. Military historian Dockery (SEALs in Action, 1991) makes no attempt to get beneath his subject’s skin, so Chalker comes across as a super-bad macho dude devoted to deadly weapons, fighting, and his buddies on the team. Clearly he chose the right career, because these are perfect qualifications for a SEAL.
Despite the absence of insights, an entertaining life of a member in good standing of a highly elite band of brothers.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-380-97804-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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