Simple, well-told stories that will interest general readers and certainly anyone contemplating a career in special...
Following up his best-seller No Easy Day (2012), about the killing of Osama bin Laden, former Navy SEAL Owen offers some life lessons drawn from his training and service.
Owen has a fear of heights, and he’s not all that comfortable a swimmer. Nevertheless, he spent 14 years as a Navy SEAL, where swimming in darkness through icy waters and cutting yourself loose from a malfunctioning parachute are only small parts of the job description. However, the author insists that there’s nothing especially wondrous about conquering deficiencies, surviving mistakes and becoming “an asset to the team.” Instead, SEAL success stems from a purposeful, hardworking, trained brotherhood committed to excellence. He builds each of his chapters around an especially challenging career episode: climbing a sheer rock face in the Nevada desert, traversing waist-deep snow in a bitterly cold Kabul valley pass on the way to a target, or entering an al-Qaida compound rigged to explode. Each adventure highlights a specific theme: e.g., how to control fear: “Stay in your three-foot world”; how to handle stress and the importance of not rushing, slowing things down; how “to be comfortable being uncomfortable.” In other passages, Owen emphasizes the significance of building trust up and down the chain of command, of clear communications, of nurturing relationships to improve teamwork, of ensuring accountability, of improvising and evolving to meet the enemy’s constantly shifting tactics and techniques. Near the end of his account, he hints at the personal toll combat inflicts. The image of a kitten lapping the pool of blood from an Iraqi fighter’s shattered skull as a petrified, whimpering child looks on will certainly stay with readers, as it has with Owen. Still, he takes solace knowing he protected his mates, “obeyed the rules of engagement and never targeted innocents.”
Simple, well-told stories that will interest general readers and certainly anyone contemplating a career in special operations.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0525954521
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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
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