A remarkable story told with modesty and grace.
Clear-eyed account of a youth devoted to service as a warrior and a humanitarian.
Greitens (Strength & Compassion: Photographs and Essays, 2008), founder of the veterans charity The Mission Continues, has achieved some impressive milestones, having been both a Rhodes Scholar and a Navy SEAL. Before that, however, he was an inquisitive and seemingly naive youngster, reading books about heroes and worrying he’d been born too late to have a meaningful life. In college at Duke, dissatisfied with his public-policy courses, he began to challenge himself, first by teaching English in China and then by studying boxing at a hardscrabble African-American gym. Intrigued by the art of forging human connections with those different from him, he found more disturbing experiences as a volunteer working with orphaned children in Bosnia and survivors of the Rwandan genocide. He became understandably convinced that “[i]f we really care about these people, we have to be willing to protect them from harm.” In 2001, the 26-year-old Greitens made the improbable transition from Oxford academics to Naval Officer Candidate School, then to the notoriously brutal SEAL training, with its 80 percent failure rate. Following the program’s vividly depicted “Hell Week,” Greitens was a newly minted SEAL when 9/11 occurred. The author served on secretive antiterrorist missions in Kenya, the Philippines and Afghanistan, and was ultimately wounded by a suicide car bomb in Iraq. Shortly after his last deployment, he learned of a close friend’s death in Iraq and channeled his grief (and considerable resourcefulness) into developing a charitable organization that helps wounded veterans restart their lives via participation in public-service organizations. The writing throughout is straightforward and effectively personalized, detailed yet unadorned; one would have to be mighty cynical to resist the power of Greitens’ experiences, and young Americans would benefit from contemplating his message.
A remarkable story told with modesty and grace.Pub Date: April 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-42485-9
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
