A unique attack on the war by an author who comes across as a genuine idealist.
The first Iraq War veteran elected to Congress turns out to be an intelligent observer who hated what he saw and decided to do something about it.
Raised in a blue-collar Philadelphia family, Murphy pulled himself together after a misspent youth, joined the Army ROTC, attended Widener University School of Law and became the youngest professor at West Point. Teaching law to senior cadets, he stressed that no American is too powerful to be above the law—or to decide that someone else doesn’t deserve its protection. As examples, he maintains that both the army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule on homosexuality and the Bush administration’s policy of denying prisoners protection under the Geneva Convention fall below American standards of justice. Despite his position in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, Murphy was a gung-ho soldier who underwent paratrooper training and joined the 82nd Airborne Division. Transferring to Iraq in 2003, he witnessed the chaos that ensued when the United States destroyed the infrastructure, dismissed Saddam Hussein’s officials and disbanded his army. Readers will share Murphy’s amazement at discovering the absence of a plan for following up the victory. There were far too few soldiers in the occupying force, and they were disgracefully ill-equipped for fighting an insurgency. Billions in reconstruction money, dispensed by American contractors to Iraqi subcontractors, vanished without a trace. Writing about the 82nd Airborne, the author has nothing but praise for its members, who sacrificed and sometimes died to bring security and honest government to their area despite clueless civilian superiors. He left the service, returned home and, in 2005, decided to run for Congress as a critic of the war. The book’s final third delivers a nuts-and-bolts account of his campaign, an uphill struggle in a conservative district against a ruthless, well-financed incumbent.
A unique attack on the war by an author who comes across as a genuine idealist.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8695-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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