Golembesky clearly admires the valor of his fellow Marines, but a conviction that the Afghan war has long been a costly,...
Grim account of wearying combat in Afghanistan by a Marine Special Operations unit.
Co-writing with prolific military writer Bruning (Outlaw Platoon: Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan, 2012, etc.), Golembesky presents himself as an unlikely Marine, a spiritual bohemian type who joined following 9/11. After multiple tours in Iraq, he still wanted to serve in Afghanistan. His specialty was also unusual: as a Joint Terminal Attack Controller, he was “authorized to control aviation ordnance,” utilizing GPS and other technologies to direct devastating airstrikes. Despite the Marines’ superior firepower and training, they appeared alienated from their mission due to restrictive rules of engagement, callous military bureaucracy and their sense that the brutal culture of Afghanistan could not be changed. The narrative focuses first on a rescue mission in which the Marines witnessed a horrific friendly fire incident involving American air power. Later, they deployed for an extended combat tour on a remote mountain spine, meant to divide a Taliban-heavy region in half yet compromised by a clique of powerful local Afghans who played both sides. As the battle unfolded, Golembesky noted that his comrades had “grown bitter and had given up on our role in Afghanistan….the way we were fighting bordered on the ridiculous.” The author writes perceptively about the complex social environment of Afghanistan, as when the Marines realized they were fighting in old Russian trenches against enemies whom the U.S. once armed. Similarly, they understood that most civilians would collaborate with vicious Taliban cells simply to survive: “[T]he margin between working with the locals and inadvertently providing intel to the enemy seemed razor-thin.” The depictions of combat are precise regarding weapons and tactics but also jargon-heavy, giving the action a video game feel.
Golembesky clearly admires the valor of his fellow Marines, but a conviction that the Afghan war has long been a costly, corrupted quagmire pervades this military memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03040-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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