A harrowing personal journey of courageous self-empowerment during wartime.
Fiery, insightful memoir from the former Iraqi translator who fought alongside U.S. Special Forces during the recent war in Iraq.
With the assistance of DeFelice (co-author: American Sniper, 2012, etc.) and writing as a first-time author under a protective pseudonym, “Johnny Walker,” this Mosul-born, pro-American Muslim Iraqi relates a sometimes-biased but invaluable insider’s perspective of Iraq after Saddam Hussein. After an undistinguished stint in the badly trained Iraqi army, the author made a decision early on in the 2003 conflict that to provide for his family, he would have to collaborate with the American occupying force. Although his initial attempts at obtaining work as a translator and adviser for the Americans were frustrated, he eventually caught on with the Navy SEALs. Quickly, he began to learn that being a translator also meant being a combat-ready soldier and risking his life. Things began to get seriously dangerous for “Johnny,” however, when his relationship with the American forces became well-known around Mosul, which made him a potential target for assassins. This pressure to both serve his American employers and still retain close ties to his own Iraqi community is what eventually drove him to pursue his dream of immigrating to America. Throughout the book, the author gives a vivid sense of what it’s like to be stuck geopolitically between a rock and a hard place: Iraqis like him rejected the tyrannical rule of Hussein but then had to endure the chaos of the destabilizing influence that the U.S.-led invasion wrought on the country. Although he defends the motives behind the American invasion, the question of whether this pre-emptive military action was an effective operation in the long run is a point he mostly evades until the end of the book. Ultimately, any national allegiances take a back seat to “Johnny’s” survival instincts. Eventually, the once-impossible dream of becoming an American citizen and bringing his family to the U.S. became a hard-won reality.
A harrowing personal journey of courageous self-empowerment during wartime.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-226755-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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