A courageous breaking of the code of silence to seek mental health for veterans and the war-scarred.
The story of the friendship between an embedded photographer in Afghanistan and a Marine who was wounded in an ambush explosion in 2010.
In this poignant memoir penned in alternating points of view by two very different participants in America’s war in Afghanistan, the authors achieve a shared sense of emotional and physical trauma. O’Reilly, a photojournalist who has spent more than a decade in the most dangerous hot spots on the planet, from Africa to Helmand Province, and Brennan, a Marine squad leader on deployment in Afghanistan, met during that horrific Taliban attack in 2010. O’Reilly took pictures of a wounded Brennan and put them on a web link, to the alarm of his parents, who did not know what was going on. Ultimately, the two “misfits” would meet again in America over their shared suffering from long-running PTSD. After his many deployments and injuries, Brennan suffered from serious concussions, although he preferred to lie about the symptoms rather than reveal the extent of his injuries; O’Reilly, stationed in war zones in Africa and elsewhere, was in denial about his emotional instability. Both men ultimately sought professional help, though for Brennan, it was particularly arduous and painful; even asking for help as a Marine branded him as a “pussy” and lowered his stature with his squad. Nonetheless, the plethora of suicides among his acquaintances and his own bewilderment propelled him to change his career to being a journalist chronicling veterans’ concerns. O’Reilly, on the other hand, had to fight feelings of being “predatory and repulsive” in shooting and publishing scenes of violence. Ultimately, the authors effectively reveal how they moved beyond the “fog of war” and forged a new life after the trauma.
A courageous breaking of the code of silence to seek mental health for veterans and the war-scarred.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56254-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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