An inspiring book about heroism and sacrifice.
A French immigrant and U.S. Army captain tells the story behind the remarkable act of bravery that earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Son of an American father and an Algerian mother, Groberg lived in Europe until he was 12. His uncle Abdou, whom the author would visit on trips to Algeria, exerted an especially strong influence on him. A witness to the Franco-Algerian War, Abdou taught the boy that “freedom ha[d] to be earned” even if it meant risking one’s life. When the author's family immigrated to the United States, Abdou joined the Algerian army to combat a radical Islamist organization, the Groupe Islamique Armé, and died in the line of duty. Vowing to be part of the anti-terrorist solution, the author enlisted in the Army after graduating from college. He began the officer training that ended with a difficult but ultimately successful stint at Ranger School. His first deployment was to the Pech River Valley in Afghanistan, “the most dangerous place on earth.” There, he came face to face with his own greenness as a platoon leader and saw firsthand the way war changed both the men he led and the Afghanis he encountered. A second deployment followed a year and half later, this time as a personal security detachment commander. During one outing of U.S. and Afghani VIPs, Groberg spotted a suicide bomber walking nearby. He sprinted toward the man and pushed him away from the delegation. In the explosion that followed, four men—three of whom were Groberg’s friends—died. The author sustained career-ending injuries and a soul-crushing case of survivor’s guilt that nearly destroyed him. In this short, candid book, Groberg—with the assistance of Sileo (co-author: Fire in My Eyes: An American Warrior’s Journey from Being Blinded on the Battlefield to Gold Medal Victory, 2014, etc.)—offers insight into the profound sense of duty that drives members of the military while celebrating one man’s extraordinary courage.
An inspiring book about heroism and sacrifice.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6588-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
