An extremely poignant statement on human vulnerability and the devastation of war.
The brief yet highly courageous life of a gravely wounded Iraq War veteran.
Tomas Young, born in 1979 and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, had profound doubts about being shipped to fight in the Iraq War in April 2004. As U.S. Army veteran and author Wilkerson (Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend, 2009, etc.) points out in this straightforward, sympathetic account, Young believed that the United States should be targeting Afghanistan rather than Iraq, and he was appalled that his unit received no training on Iraq or its people. Still, he realized he had to go (the military “kind of own you at that point,” he recalled). Less than a week into his deployment in Sadr City, Iraq, on what was a spectacularly ill-organized and disastrous mission, the truck he was stuffed into came under ambush and was riddled with bullets, leaving many soldiers wounded, included Young, who suffered a severed spinal cord. He spent weeks at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and then months at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Louis—though it was clear that Young was paralyzed from the midtorso down and would need constant medical care for the rest of his life. His mother proved to be his solid support, as well as successive wives. Moreover, talk show host and anti-war activist Phil Donahue resolved to make a documentary on Young and his emerging activism in the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. The subsequent film, Body of War, co-directed by Ellen Spiro, was a critical but not commercial success, though it gained Young national support and attention. After nine years of living with his severe disability and all the accompanying ailments and distress, which Wilkerson delineates in detail here, Young was ready to take his own life—before he died quietly in his sleep on Nov. 10, 2014, at the age of 34.
An extremely poignant statement on human vulnerability and the devastation of war.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60846-650-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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