An occasionally uneven but unquestionably inspiring story traversing the personal and public battlefields of sexual assault...
Dostie’s debut memoir describes the journey of a woman soldier struggling to survive and compete in a system that demanded she fall in line.
Though she hoped to travel and attend college after high school, a meeting with a recruiting officer led to Dostie’s enrollment in the Army, where she became a Persian-Farsi/Dari linguist in military intelligence. There are two main stories here: The first one traces the aftermath of rape. The author was raped by a fellow soldier, and she details what seems like deliberate incompetence in the handling of the case through official channels. In addition to the emotional fallout of rape, she also faced the cruelty of seeing her attacker and his friends nearly every day. Discussing how her account of the events and her credibility were undermined, Dostie exposes how pervasive bias functions in this guarded system. Despite many challenges, the author managed to do what she was trained to do: follow orders. When she found herself on the front lines in Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, determination and growing rage fueled her survival. The second story follows the development of a bruised but not defeated soldier struggling with PTSD, coping with the challenges of adjusting to civilian life, and contemplating the political and philosophical issues involved in the war. Dostie successfully navigated life at home, and she ably demonstrates the contrast between developing agency and a strong sense of self after sexual assault and the demands of the Army power structure, which expected more obedience than independence. Each of these narratives deserves to be heard, and though they may have been stronger as two pieces, Dostie does a service by frankly confronting the hypermasculinized culture of the armed forces.
An occasionally uneven but unquestionably inspiring story traversing the personal and public battlefields of sexual assault in the armed forces.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3153-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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