A straightforward, honest, and humble memoir.
Kyle relates the story of her life with her husband, Chris Kyle, of American Sniper fame.
With the assistance of DeFelice, who also co-authored American Sniper, Kyle gives readers an inside view of life in their early years of marriage, the moments of tenderness and romance that drew them together, the births of their two children, and the sadness, disappointment, and anger she felt when Kyle was deployed repeatedly to various locations in the Middle East. She discusses some of the missions her husband carried out in dangerous places like Ramadi, Fallujah, and Baghdad and how Chris did his job without question, seeing it as a duty to protect those he had sworn to serve. Kyle delves into the difficulties they both experienced when her husband decided not to re-enlist, the emotional ups and downs and physical toll his job had taken on him, and her own need to have him be whole. The author also addresses the process of writing American Sniper and the overnight fame it brought, as well as the Jesse Ventura lawsuit, Chris’ murder, and the overwhelming grief she experienced after her husband’s death. Kyle includes actual emails Chris sent while on deployment that address the terrible pressures she felt being a military wife in charge of two small children while fearing for her husband’s life. The story is gritty, romantic, and bittersweet, as only a story of this nature can be. It may not have a happy ending, but it is filled with a love, a strong faith in God, family, and country, and the determination of a woman to carry on as best she can under the strain of fame and the burden of grief. Those familiar with American Sniper will appreciate this perspective on Kyle’s life.
A straightforward, honest, and humble memoir.Pub Date: May 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-239808-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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