Showing posts with label war stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war stories. Show all posts
May 3, 2019
Dec 1, 2015
Canal bridge: a novel Ireland, love, and the First World War - Tom Phelan
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* From Phelan's effectively constructed and emotionally honest novel about Irish participation in WWI, the reader gains a new perspective on how the Great War decimated lives throughout Europe. Told in a chorus of alternating but harmonious voices, the narrative relates the story of two boyhood chums in rural Ireland who, in a monumental gesture to broaden their horizons, together join the British army (this is 1913, when Ireland was still part of the UK) and are eventually deployed to India. But before their troop ship can arrive there, the vessel is required to turn back. War has been declared in Europe, and the two boys are plunged full-tilt into the carnage as stretcher bearers. Battle scenes are graphically drawn but appropriately so. Phelan's intention is to accurately show the staggering waste of human life that the two friends observe, the memories of which keep the one friend who returns to Ireland at war's end from being mentally quite at home for some time. As is observed, "There are more ways of getting killed in a war than by bullets." Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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Sep 14, 2015
The valley - John Renehan
Summary: "A former Army Captain's gripping portrait of a fighting division holding a remote outpost in Afghanistan reminiscent of Apocalypse Now, The Yellow Birds, and Matterhorn There were many valleys in the mountains of Afghanistan, and most were hard places where people died hard deaths. But there was only one Valley. Black didn't even know its proper name. But he knew about the Valley. It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst. It lay deeper and higher in the mountains than any other place Americans had ventured. You had to travel through a network of interlinked valleys, past all the other remote American outposts, just to get to its mouth. Stories circulated periodically, tales of land claimed and fought for, or lost and overrun, new attempts made or turned back, outposts abandoned and reclaimed. They were impossible to verify. Everything about the Valley was myth and rumor. The strung-out platoon Black finds after traveling deep into the heart of the Valley, and the illumination of the dark secrets accumulated during month after month fighting and dying in defense of an indefensible piece of land, provide a shattering portrait of men at war"-- Provided by publisher.
Booklist Reviews
Renehan borrows the plotline from Heart of Darkness, in which a naive young man is dispatched to throw light upon unspeakable horror. Lieutenant Black is shuffling papers on FOB Omaha, in Afghanistan, when he's assigned to investigate an incident at a firebase near the Pakistan border. Warning shots were fired in the nearby village, but no harm was done, and the investigation should be routine. But as Black interviews enlisted men (the commander, another lieutenant, is mysteriously absent), the plot sprawls. After Black commits what seems to be a boneheaded error with the village chief, the firebase is fiercely attacked. Amid the chaos, Black at last deduces the horror, though he's wounded in the process, and the firebase is almost overrun. The long firefight is exciting, but Renehan works so hard at suspense that it almost parodies itself, and he leaves behind so many red herrings he has to spend 20 pages explaining what happened. Still, a novel about the war in Afghanistan is welcome indeed, and Renehan, who served as an artillery officer in Iraq, certainly knows what he's talking about. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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Feb 5, 2015
Redeployment - Phil Klay
Summary: A collection of short stories by a former Marine captain and Iraq veteran focuses on the complexities of life for soldiers on the front lines and after, exploring themes ranging from brutality and faith to guilt and survival in such stories as "After Action Report" and "Money as Weapons System." - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Klay's stories are sensational, with vivid characters, biting dialogue, and life within and beyond the Afghan and Iraq wars conveyed with an addictive combination of the mundane and the horrifying. A soldier reenters civilian life after the surreal wartime task of shooting dogs that eat corpses. A rookie takes part in a raid on insurgents and then eats cobbler. Two soldiers agree to swap responsibility for a killing. A foreign service officer navigates bureaucracy with results that are no less sad for being comic. Soldiers return to barracks after patrol and wordlessly pick up their video games, which they choose over sleep. Redeployment is most remarkable, though, for the questions it asks about the aims and effects of war stories themselves, and Klay displays a thoughtful awareness of this literary tradition. That perspective holds these diverse tales together, as his narrators ask why and how war stories are told. What details does a soldier share with civilians? Does one tell it funny or tell it serious? Is the storytelling a further return to war, a redeployment in itself? Those questions, and Klay's exciting new voice, may stay with the reader long after this book is back on the shelf. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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Nov 1, 2014
The Last of the Doughboys - Richard Rubin
The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War - Rubin, RichardSummary: Collected over ten years, presents interviews with the last remaining World War I veterans, aged 101 to 113, to paint a picture of a time and a generation that, despite memorials and history lessons, is quickly fading away.
Booklist Reviews
There may be as many as a million surviving veterans of WWII, and their stream of memoirs continues, contributing to their place as part of the "Greatest Generation." But the last known American veteran of the Great War died in 2011. Determined to obtain and document the remembrances of the surviving "doughboys," journalist Rubin began an effort to locate and interview many of them a decade ago. The result is this fascinating and deeply moving collection of individual stories. These veterans, between the ages of 101 and 113, tell their stories in sometimes halting ways; but aided by the patience and prompting of Rubin, they provide a vivid picture of their wartime experiences as well as the vastly different American society from which they sprang. Most of these men came from rural backgrounds, and they used horsepower rather than tractors to plow fields. Some describe their shock at their first exposure to industrial-scale warfare, while others stepped easily into the beginnings of aerial combat. Some recall the comradeship, while others emphasize the terror of trench warfare. This is an important and masterful tribute to those who participated in a conflict that continues to shape the world today.
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Nov 1, 2013
The paladin - Brian Garfield
The paladin: a novel based on fact - Garfield, Brian
Summary: In 1940, Winston Churchill recruits a fifteen-year-old schoolboy to serve as a secret agent--code name Christopher Robin - (Baker & Taylor)
Kirkus Review
/* Starred Review */ A remarkable adventure novel ostensibly based on fact and written in collaboration with its real-life hero, "Christopher Creighton." While a ten-year-old schoolboy, Creighton accidentally knocked over a fresh brick wall being put up by his fat, cigar-smoking country neighbor, Winston Churchill, who then took a liking to the lad. Over the next five years they became quite friendly, and when Winston was made Prime Minister, he called the boy for a secret visit and asked him to be a spy for England--by visiting schoolfriend Prince Paul in Belgium and discovering the dispositions of the Belgian army. (Winston will then be able to figure out whether Hitler plans to invade France through Belgium.) Christopher is magnificently successful, meets Von Ribbentrop, overhears and reports back the vital information that Belgium will capitulate to Hitler without a shot. . . and so the British decide to retreat to Dunkirk and evacuate rather than stay and fight a hopeless cause. Soon Christopher is Winston's personal secret agent, his teenage paladin: he goes through horrid training exercises in which he actually kills German prisoners; he is himself beaten nearly to death for training purposes; and he is later sent to implant time bombs in a Dutch submarine's torpedoes and destroy the sub with all aboard (all allies?). Why? Because the Admiralty does not want Roosevelt to receive Dutch intelligence about the planned attack on Pearl Harbor, intelligence that might be used to keep the U.S. out of the war. And after three more assassinations of innocent soldiers, Christopher's last job is to pass himself off as a double agent and give the Germans false information about the Normandy landing--but only after unendurable torture and an attempt at suicide using a hollow cyanide tooth. . . . How much of this is true, how much fiction? One has to assume that if all or most of it were verifiable, this would have been non-fiction, not a novel. Still, veteran Garfield punches it all out with assured panache: larger-than-life Churchill, exploit after exploit, horror upon horror. So, believe it or not, this is a ripping good yarn--with food for all sorts of WW II-history speculation. (Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 1980)
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Sep 1, 2013
The things they carried - Tim O'Brien
Summary: An anniversary edition of a collection of interconnected fictional stories follows the members of an American platoon fighting in the Vietnam War, in a book that mirrors the author's own wartime experiences. This finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award has been banned for profanity and other strong language. - (Baker & Taylor)
BookList Review
"In the end. . .a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen." In Tim O'Brien's world, of course, a war story is all that--and more. The author of the National Book Award-winning Going After Cacciato offers us fiction in a unique form: a kind of "faction" presented as a collection of related stories that have the cumulative effect of a unified novel. The "things they carry"--literally--are prosaic things: amphetamines, M-16s, grenades, good-luck charms, Sterno cans, toilet paper, photographs, C-rations. But the men in O'Brien's platoon--Curt Lemon, Rat Kiley, Henry Dobbins, Kiowa, and the rest--also carry less tangible but more palpable things such as disease, confusion, hatred, love, regret, fear, what passes for courage; in short, the prototypical psychological profile of the youthful Vietnam vet. There are 22 pieces here in all, some of which were previously published in such diverse literary arenas as Playboy, Granta, GQ, and Esquire. The prose ranges from staccato soldierly thoughts to raw depictions of violent death to intense personal ruminations by the author that don't appear to be fictional at all. ("On the Rainy River," O'Brien's account of the time he almost fled to Canada after receiving his draft notice, is particularly moving.) Just when you thought there was nothing left to say about the Vietnam experience. . .there's plenty. ((Reviewed March 15, 1990)) -- Martin Brady
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Jul 1, 2013
The things they carried - Tim O'Brien
Summary: An anniversary edition of a collection of interconnected fictional stories follows the members of an American platoon fighting in the Vietnam War, in a book that mirrors the author's own wartime experiences. This finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award has been banned for profanity and other strong language. - (Baker & Taylor)
BookList Review
"In the end. . .a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen." In Tim O'Brien's world, of course, a war story is all that--and more. The author of the National Book Award-winning Going After Cacciato offers us fiction in a unique form: a kind of "faction" presented as a collection of related stories that have the cumulative effect of a unified novel. The "things they carry"--literally--are prosaic things: amphetamines, M-16s, grenades, good-luck charms, Sterno cans, toilet paper, photographs, C-rations. But the men in O'Brien's platoon--Curt Lemon, Rat Kiley, Henry Dobbins, Kiowa, and the rest--also carry less tangible but more palpable things such as disease, confusion, hatred, love, regret, fear, what passes for courage; in short, the prototypical psychological profile of the youthful Vietnam vet. There are 22 pieces here in all, some of which were previously published in such diverse literary arenas as Playboy, Granta, GQ, and Esquire. The prose ranges from staccato soldierly thoughts to raw depictions of violent death to intense personal ruminations by the author that don't appear to be fictional at all. ("On the Rainy River," O'Brien's account of the time he almost fled to Canada after receiving his draft notice, is particularly moving.) Just when you thought there was nothing left to say about the Vietnam experience. . .there's plenty. ((Reviewed March 15, 1990)) -- Martin Brady
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Dec 1, 2012
The yellow birds - Kevin Powers
Summary: In the midst of a bloody battle in the Iraq War, two soldiers, bound together since basic training, do everything to protect each other from both outside enemies and the internal struggles that come from constant danger.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
This moving debut from Powers (a former Army machine gunner) is a study of combat, guilt, and friendship forged under fire. Pvt. John Bartle, 21, and Pvt. Daniel Murphy, 18, meet at Fort Dix, N.J., where Bartle is assigned to watch over Murphy. The duo is deployed to Iraq, and the novel alternates between the men's war zone experiences and Bartle's life after returning home. Early on, it emerges that Murphy has been killed; Bartle is haunted by guilt, and the details of Murphy's death surface slowly. Powers writes gripping battle scenes, and his portrait of male friendship, while cheerless, is deeply felt. As a poet, the author's prose is ambitious, which sets his treatment of the theme apart—as in this musing from Bartle: "though it's hard to get close to saying what the heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those parentheses which were the beginning and end of my war." The sparse scene where Bartle finally recounts Murphy's fate is masterful and Powers's style and story are haunting. (Sept.)
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Mar 1, 2012
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Summary: In 1910, Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman, journeys to France on business, becomes embroiled in a series of traumatic events, including a clandestine love affair, and never returns home, only to be trapped amid the horrors of the First World War. 25,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)
Publishers Weekly Reviews
In 1910, England's Stephen Wraysford, a junior executive in a textile firm, is sent by his company to northern France. There he falls for Isabelle Azaire, a young and beautiful matron who abandons her abusive husband and sticks by Stephen long enough to conceive a child. Six years later, Stephen is back in France, as a British officer fighting in the trenches. Facing death, embittered by isolation, he steels himself against thoughts of love. But despite rampant disease, harrowing tunnel explosions and desperate attacks on highly fortified German positions, he manages to survive, and to meet with Isabelle again. The emotions roiled up by this meeting, however, threaten to ruin him as a soldier. Everything about this novel, which was a bestseller in England, is outsized, from its epic, if occasionally ramshackle, narrative to its gruesome and utterly convincing descriptions of battlefield horrors. Faulks (A Fool's Alphabet) proves himself a grand storyteller here. Enlivened with considerable historical detail related through accomplished prose, his narrative flows with a pleasingly appropriate recklessness that brings his characters to dynamic life. (Feb.) Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information.
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Mar 2, 2011
City of thieves: a novel - David Benioff
Summary: A writer visits his retired grandparents in Florida to document their experience during the infamous siege of Leningrad. His grandmother won't talk about it, but his grandfather reluctantly consents. The result is the captivating odyssey of two young men trying to survive against desperate odds.
Booklist Reviews
In 1941, the Germans circled Leningrad, starving its remaining citizens. His mother and sister evacuated, 17-year-old Lev Beniov remained, heeding the call for every able-bodied man to come to the defense of his country. After being caught out after curfew, Lev is thrown in the Crosses, the notorious prison, and while waiting for what he assumes will be an inglorious end, a summary execution at dawn, he is joined by the gregarious, indefatigable, and literature-spouting soldier, Kolya, imprisoned for desertion. When their lives are spared, they are assigned the impossible task of acquiring a dozen eggs for the wedding of a colonel's daughter, a task that takes them into the company of cannibals and Einsatzgruppen, dreaded Nazi death squads. A high-spirited adventure, Benioff's second novel (following the 2001 debut, The 25th Hour), ostensibly an account of the author's grandfather—a quiet immigrant who sold his real-estate business and retired to Florida with his wife—takes more than a little poetic license. When Benioff tells his grandfather that a few things don't make sense in the narrative, his reply: "You're a writer. Make it up." Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.
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Dec 1, 2010
Behemoth - Scott Westerfeld
Series Title: Leviathan Series
Summary: Continues the story of Austrian Prince Alek who, in an alternate 1914 Europe, eludes the Germans by traveling in the Leviathan to Constantinople, where he faces a whole new kind of genetically-engineered warships.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
The action is nonstop in Westerfeld's thrilling sequel to last year's Leviathan--fans of that book won't be disappointed. It's 1914 in the author's alternate world, the great powers are moving toward full-scale war, and Deryn, still posing as a boy, has found a place as a midshipman aboard the gigantic, living British airship Leviathan as it sails east on its secret mission to Istanbul. When Austria-Hungary enters the conflict, her friend Alek, the runaway heir to that empire, realizes that he must escape from the airship to avoid imprisonment, giving Deryn "a chance not just to help Alek but to change the course of the whole barking war." Battles abound between eccentric fighting machines and even stranger fabricated "beasties" as Deryn and Alek prove their courage and ingenuity while putting themselves in harm's way. This exciting and inventive tale of military conflict and wildly reimagined history should captivate a wide range of readers. Thompson's evocative and detailed spot art (as well as the luridly gorgeous endpapers) only sweetens the deal. Ages 12–up. (Oct.)
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Nov 1, 2010
Leviathan - Scott Westerfeld
Series Title: Leviathan Series
Summary: In an alternate 1914 Europe, fifteen-year-old Austrian Prince Alek, on the run from the Clanker Powers who are attempting to take over the globe using mechanical machinery, forms an uneasy alliance with Deryn who, disguised as a boy to join the British Air Service, is learning to fly genetically-engineered beasts.
Booklist Reviews
Instead of the Victorian era most often found in the steampunk genre, Westerfeld sets his new series in a Europe hovering on the edge of World War I. The ingenious premise is that Europe is divided not only into traditional historical camps, but also into Darwinists, who genetically manipulate animal "life-strands" into beasts and even whole self-contained ecosystems with wondrous capabilities, and Clankers, whose imposing constructions of metal and gears are a marvel of technological wizardry. Deryn Sharp, from Darwinist England, disguises herself as a boy to enlist on the Leviathan, a flying whale-ship, while Prince Alek, recently orphaned son of Archduke Ferdinand, finds himself on the run in a sort of walking Clanker tank. The plot is boosted almost entirely by exciting and sometimes violent fight sequences, but reading about (and seeing, thanks to Thompson's ample, lavish, and essential illustrations) the wildly imaginative creatures and machines provides nearly as much drive. Fans of Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines (2003) or Kenneth Oppel's Airborn (2004) will be right at home in Westerfeld's alternate reality. Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.
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Jul 1, 2010
Regeneration - Pat Barker
Regeneration - Barker, Pat
Summary: Stressed by the war, Siegfried Sassoon is sent to Craiglockhart Hospital, where his views challenge the patriotic vision of Dr. William Rivers - (Baker & Taylor)
Kirkus Reviews
In this fact/fiction hybrid, Barker (Union Street, 1983, etc.) turns from the struggle for survival of northern England working- class folk to the struggle back to sanity by British officers unhinged by WW I trench warfare. Craiglockhart War Hospital, a grim psychiatric facility outside Edinburgh, is the setting. The framework is the arrival of Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart in the summer of 1917, and his discharge back to France in November. Sassoon is treated by the eminent neurologist (and Army captain) William Rivers, whose job is to restore his damaged warriors to fighting condition. Sassoon is a relatively easy assignment. Despite his public statement protesting the war, Sassoon is no pacifist; this complex poet feels at home in the Army and is an exceptionally courageous officer, beloved by his men, to whom he feels a blood-debt that can be paid only by his return. For all the sparring between Sassoon and Rivers, only a hair separates them, for the latter is also a man of enormous integrity, profoundly troubled by the horrors his patients must endure. And it is these horrors (not the clipped exchanges of Sassoon and Rivers) that linger in the mind: Burns's vomiting nightmares caused by a mouthful of decomposing German flesh; Prior's being rendered mute after handling a human eye. At the center is Rivers, a model therapist, whose unstinting support may give even the wretched Burns a chance at a normal life. Barker has also provided some workmanlike off-base romance for Prior, her one developed fictional character; but the heart of the work, where the big fish swim, is Rivers's consciousness, his insights into front- line behavior enriched by his anthropological straining. Don't look here for the dramatic sweep of a war novel; instead, you get a scrupulously fair reconstruction of Craiglockhart, plus a moving empathy for both doctors and patients. The extent of that empathy earns Barker's work a place on the shelf of WW I literature. Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews
May 3, 2010
The Aubrey/Maturin Series – Patrick O’Brian
The Aubrey/Maturin Series - O’Brian, Patrick
Series Title: The Aubrey/Maturin novels
1. Master and Commander (1970)
2. Post Captain (1972)
3. H.M.S. Surprise (1973)
4. The Mauritius Command (1977)
5. Desolation Island (1978)
6. The Fortune Of War (1979)
7. The Surgeon's Mate (1980)
8. The Ionian Mission (1981)
9. Treason's Harbour (1983)
10. The Far Side Of The World (1984)
11. The Reverse Of The Medal (1986)
12. The Letter Of Marque (1988)
13. The Thirteen Gun Salute (1989)
14. The Nutmeg Of Consolation (1991)
15. The Truelove (1992)
aka Clarissa Oakes
16. The Wine-Dark Sea (1993)
17. The Commodore (1995)
18. The Yellow Admiral (1996)
19. The Hundred Days (1998)
20. Blue At The Mizzen (1999)
21. The Final, Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey (2004)
Staff Review
I read this series (20 titles) over a summer ten years ago; they were excellent then, they are superb now. Impeccably researched, they are set in the Napoleonic era, upon the Mediterranean and oceans of the world; the series follows the careers and adventures of the Royal Navy's Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin, a naval surgeon, naturalist and spy.
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