As much as I love long, never-ending stories, I also love short bursts of feeling that show you raw and impossible to deny realities. The best material for these kind of explosions are war stories, because their truth is not a very fictional one, you can't make it more romantic. It's painful and bar...
In a word: Perfect. This is more of a poem than a novel, as the words combine and explode in a burst of great color and smell and sound like molecules in an exothermic reaction. I'm in awe of Powers' talent. How could this be someone's first book, written in his late 20s? As a late 30-something writ...
Fraught with emotion, this is an achingly heartbreaking tale of war. Devastatingly honest and brutal in its images, it is hard to read without discomfort. It propels one to second guess their own thoughts about war and the reasons for the unnecessary sacrifice of life.It feels like a series of rando...
After reading a book recommended by one of my GR friends, I sometimes go back and read their review to see if it is close to what I'm thinking about the book. I did that, reading my friend Jeff Keeten's The Yellow Birds review this morning (for the second time) and again read every one the 56 comme...
My dad was a cold warrior, serving in the Air Force from before my birth to well into my adult years. Part of that time was spent serving in Vietnam and Thailand (and, yes, there was combat in Thailand at the time) where he was a radio operator who also served on base defense whenever his base was a...
Somewhere around 3 stars. Some beautifully written and resonant passages, and many that are overwritten (so many adverbs! Sometimes consecutively!). Powers served in Iraq in 2004, and The Yellow Birds seems to be his way of positing the questions he was left with. They remain unanswered; the novel i...
Haunting, poetic and elegaic novel about the Iraq War and the mysteries and unknowabilities of war, life and death. Powers touches on many things- youth, innocence, brutality, alienation, longing, truth, lies, the burden of the past and the future. It's a lovely and sad book and essential reading. F...
One of the most outstanding, beautiful and memorable books I've read in a long time, and it is a book about the Iraq war written by a veteran of that war. It stands alongside "Matterhorn" and "The Things They Carried" for me, and that is high praise. Superb writing: poetic and surprising and challen...
Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, I almost didn't give 5 stars because the ending felt loose to me. Then I asked, what would make it 5 stars, and I realized: nothing. Beautiful and poetic prose (and I hate poetry) with stream of consciousness rants, "real" characters.Hoping for more from t...
As I mentioned somewhere else: this is a book that's trying very hard. Laura Miller from Salon, whose views I tend to disagree with, quit on it; she cited this sentence: "While we slept the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer." I think she picked a particularly questionable sen...
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