A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

 

I pulled this book off a shelf because I was intrigued by the title. I had never heard of the book, though a little gold disk on the cover informs me that it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. (In my defense, I was reading a lot of tax law in 1993…) I decided to read the book because the first sentences of the first story are enchanting. “I have no hatred in me. I am almost certain of that.”

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain consists of 15 short stories each narrated in a different voice—all the narrators are Vietnamese refugees living in Louisiana. They range from a teenage girl trying to understand her American father to an elderly man dreaming of Ho Chi Min—not the Ho Chi Min of the war, but the nineteen-year-old pastry chef in London. While each narrator has a distinctive character and perspective, there is a continuity of tone that makes for a very satisfying reading experience. [An hour of reading from a short story anthology can leave me feeling like I’ve been on the Tilt O Whirl.] All the narrators are struggling to come to terms with what they’ve left behind and what’s ahead–both the opportunities and the disappointments of American life.

As with any collection of short stories, some are better than others. “Relic” about a man who owns one of the shoes John Lennon was wearing when he was killed seemed particularly hollow. My favorites of the collection are probably “Crickets” and “The Trip Back” “Crickets” is about a man trying to connect with his very Americanized son. It is a story so very simple and quiet that the final line “see you later, Bill” hits you like a sledgehammer.

“The Trip Back” features a car trip with a much admired, but now senile, uncle. This story contains the passage that I will remember longest. “I am afraid deep down I am built on a much smaller scale than the surface of my mind aspires to. When something finally comes back to me with real force, perhaps it will be a luxury car hanging on a crane or the freshly painted wall of a new dry-cleaning store or the faint buzz of the alarm clock beside my bed. Deep down, secretly, I may be prepared to betray all that I think I love the most.”

The stories gather emotional weight subtly, almost surreptitiously. Despite serious subject matter the stories have a delicate almost fairy tale tone. By fairy tale I don’t mean this is some sort of sugary Disneyfied pap. Real fairy tales are often quite dark and disturbing. These are fairy tales in the vein of George MacDonald or Ian McEwan. Imagine if you can a story about Australian soldiers watching pornographic movies and the suicide of a Vietcong defector that might be described as delicate.

The language is simple and direct. It has a purity and elegance which sounds convincingly like the speech of a fluent but non-native speaker—quite unlike the cheesy malapropisms of Everything is Illuminated.

How is it that a man named Butler has such a clear sense of Vietnamese speech and culture? Butler is an American who served in Vietnam as a translator and loved to wander the streets of Saigon at night speaking to people. Since then, he has written ten novels and 5 volumes of short stories. His short stories have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers, Atlantic Monthly and Zoetrope:All-Story.

Butler has a passion for high concept story collections. Tabloid Dreams consists of stories based on tabloid headlines. The stories in Had a Good Time are based on vintage postcards. And most intriguing, Severance is a series of stories in the voice of beheaded mythical and historical figures. Each story is exactly 240 words long because that is apparently the number of words one is capable of uttering after the head has been severed from the body. Don’t ask me how this has been determined.

Admittedly, some of these sound too contrived for my taste. However, A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain is an excellent collection of stories that has left me eager to investigate Butler’s other works.

 

Good Neighborhoods

Nippur Neighborhoods
Elizabeth Stone

In the obscure field of cuneiform studies, there is a surprising divorce between those who study holes in the ground (archaeologists) and those who study the tablets that come out of those holes (cuneiformists). One cannot exist without the other, yet the two fields have evolved separately until now when many universities train students in one or the other. For instance, at the University of Oxford, one can get an MPhil in Cuneiform Studies without doing any serious work in the archaeology at all.

That’s what makes Elizabeth Stone’s Nippur Neighborhoods such an important work. It is not new (1987), but remains a singular example of an exemplary ambition. Stone, an archaeologist and professor at SUNY-Stonybrook, endeavors to bring the two strands of research together.

Her work examines a city, Nippur, during one period, the Old Babylonian (2000-1600 BC). The city occupies a central place in Assyriological scholarship because of the more than 30,000 cuneiform tablets that were unearthed in the 2 major expeditions to the site. The first of those expeditions, conducted by American-sponsored teams in the latter years of the 19th century, left archaeological records that are virtually useless. The second, American sponsored and begun in the years immediately after World War II, was well grounded in the stratigraphic method, and therefore the records are relatively easy to examine.

Stone does much archaeological reassessment, and makes some minor alterations to the stratigraphy of the site. She also examines many of the contracts that were found in the latter expedition and never published. The book includes a redrawing of many of the archaeological plans and copies of over 90 of the cuneiform tablets.  By putting these two types of evidence together, she has done what few Assyriologists are willing to attempt and she is to be heartily commended for the effort.

Unfortunately, the book suffers from Stone’s lack of sophistication when it comes to the cuneiform material. This is evident right from the start of the book, when she sets forth her presuppositions. One of the major ones is that Nippur was destroyed in a cataclysmic event that occurred around 1950 BC and is recorded in a cuneiform composition known as the Nippur Lament. But the Nippur Lament is properly understood as a propaganda piece legitimizing the rule of Isme-Dagan, a later king, and it’s value as a historical record is in serious doubt. The weakness of this precept, which is held as fact throughout the rest of the book, negates much of the later conclusions.

The great success of Nippur Neighborhoods is not that it made a huge advance in the field of Ancient Near Eastern research – it didn’t – it is that it exposed the cracks within the scholarly community. Those who are committed to studying cuneiform tablets (rightly) criticized the book, and as a result, there is very little work of a similar ambition. Indeed, many seem content to bypass this sort of history altogether, and instead apply modern theories of literary criticism and historical method to cuneiform material. This is a shame, because with cuneiform tablets, we have documents of many types – such as records of sales, loans, property transfers, and inheritances - that often have a specific archaeological context, virtually unheard of in other areas of ancient research.

Stone’s work is a reference to all the Assyriologists I know, though its conclusions must be taken with a grain of salt. It is thorough, readable, and definitive on many minor points. It deserves a wider reading by historians, especially Classicists, Biblicists, Egyptologists, and any other specialization in which the marriage of archaeological and documentary evidence is a rocky one.

I would be remiss if I did not include this note. This wealth of data is indeed wonderful, but surely represents only the tiniest fraction of what still remains in the ground. Unfortunately, this material is under serious threat from illegitimate excavation – looting. This looting began not long after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and continues today. Important sites, including Nippur, are being compromised such that significant scholarly excavation of them will be difficult in the future. It is sad that so few are aware of what is being lost.

 

Valuable History

When I began my theological education, I thought I would lose my mind on account of all the references to past theologians about whom I knew little or nothing. A friend might call someone else a ‘Barthian’ or a ‘Thomist’, or a lecturer would question whether a particular idea can be believed after Kant, or someone would laugh about what we would all believe even today if it hadn’t been for Anselm. I knew that I would eventually study many of these figures, but I also knew that I would not study all of them, and that much time would pass before I got to some of them. There are, of course, massive reference books with copious information to which I could (and did) turn, but I also needed something compact, something I could keep on my desk for the quick reference between lectures.

Then a friend introduced me to a very handy little book, Jonathan Hill’s The History of Christian Thought. It was just what I needed. This succinct volume packs a load of useful information. Hill divides the history of the Christian Church into roughly chronological categories: the Church Fathers, the Byzantine Empire, the Middle Ages, etc. Each section opens with a brief introduction to the important cultural, ecclesiastical, or philosophical movements that marked the particular era. Hill then turns to the main content of the section, which consists of a series of entries – each a few pages long – for the major theologians of the era. These entries are then punctuated by more general entries providing further background information – perhaps on an intellectual movement or a church council or a city that became an important centre of thought for the time.

So, are you confused about Calvin? Unsure about Schleiermacher? Ignorant of Irenaeus? In just a few minutes you can have the gist of the thought of any one of these. Each entry is clear and easy to read. Hill does a fine job of simplifying complex ideas without being unduly simplistic. Of course, certain details and nuances are glossed over because of the nature of the book, but if you’d like to know in broad strokes about the ideas of a major Christian thinker, there is a very good chance Hill will provide you what you need.

Another notable characteristic is that Hill treats different schools of thought in a balanced and objective way. To illustrate, a review on Amazon.co.uk says in essence that the book will crush any conservative impulse, while feeding the inner radical. I found nothing akin to that effect, and further, the latest edition of the book is published by IVP Academic, an Evangelical label. So Hill’s objectivity is vindicated – if your starving soul seeks further impoverishment, this work does not seek to dissuade.

Two caveats are needed, both in the category of the book’s strengths also being its weaknesses. First, because Hill does an excellent job of locating each thinker in his or her context, after reading an entry for a thinker you might realize that you need to know more about that context in order to fully understand the entry. So you might read the preceding entry, then the next preceding entry, and each entry will just be illuminating enough to drive you to its predecessor and you may find it difficult to stop. Second, because the book is of a manageable size, not all thinkers and movements are covered. For example, Eastern Orthodox thought after the Byzantine era is ignored. Neither is there mention of the recent phenomenon of Radical Orthodoxy, the writers of which are so hopelessly opaque as to beg for a concise interpreter. And perhaps most importantly from my perspective, nearly two centuries of Lutheran and Reformed confessionalist thinkers are left out in the cold.

Still, if you are not a theologian and yet are interested in the history of Christian thought, do not let these caveats keep you from purchasing The History of Christian Thought.

 

Imperium

The difficulty, as I have remarked in a comment on a previous post, in producing compelling historical fiction is bridging the inevitable gap between reader and narrator. The two are separated by time, which is a great alterer of cultures and assumptions, and therefore it is difficult for the modern author to present some plausible piece of historical work that does not alienate his reader with its strangeness. One way around this that I had not previously considered was to write a novel set in classical times, specifically in the days of the Roman Republic and Empire. Records from that time are so many and so well known that it is eminently possible to create a plausible piece of fiction set during that period. Robert Harris has done just that with Imperium.

Harris has tackled one of the more well-known historical figures from the Roman period, the great orator and writer Cicero. Harris reimagines the now lost life of Cicero written by Cicero’s own personal secretary, Marcus Tullius Tiro. Tiro is well known to historians; though nothing he wrote survives, other contemporaneous authors cite his work. Tiro is also famous for being the eponymous inventor of Tironian Notes, a form of shorthand that used some 4000 symbols for words and phrases in Latin, and allegedly allowed him to record verbatim many of Cicero’s speeches. This system was expanded during the classical period, and was adapted by monks for use in copying the Bible during the Middle Ages.

Harris’ Cicero is a man who is above all a pragmatist, but at least a somewhat principled and dignified one. Unusually for a Roman, he is non-martial, but is primarily concerned with his ambition. Early on, Cicero makes enemies of the aristocracy, forcing him to ally himself with Pompey, who was despised as a commoner by Senate blue bloods. Conflict with the aristocracy drives the book, which examines 2 major episodes from Cicero’s life – the trial of Gaius Verres, and Cicero’s pursuit of a consulship.

The novel has a few features that niggle. It is boring at times, as I wondered exactly when something was going to happen. It takes a while to get to the actual conflict in a couple of places. In those places, I kept reading because of the historical setting - when the narrative is boring it is still possible to enjoy the setting as if one is in a museum - but if it had persisted, I would have struggled to stay engaged. At a few points, Harris uses terms that very well may be authentic to the period, but set off my modernity alarm – “high crimes and misdemeanors” and “backbencher” are two examples. And the complicated politics and social organization of Rome are confusing to the reader, making certain parts confusing.

One need only to stroll the front tables of the local book megaseller to see that historical fiction is all the rage – there are novels that describe everything from Actium to Thermopylae, from Cicero to Alexander the Great, and from the Persians to medieval France. In such a clamor, Harris’ novel stands out as a very fine example of the genre, though it does not transcend it. Compared with another best-selling series set in the same period and following Julius Caesar – Conn Iggulden’s Emperor series – I found Imperium to be more engaging and more serious.

Imperium is a good read, especially if one is interested in the Roman period. It is certainly better than much of what one finds crowding the shelves and adorned with historical images. Perhaps it is not a great novel, but it is a very good historical fiction novel.

 

Ranking Crichton

This post is going to be a bit of departure for this site. But it’s Friday, we all just want to get to the weekend, and sometimes it’s good to have a little change of pace. So today, I want to rank the novels of Michael Crichton. He is the dean of thriller writers, and his stories regularly populate both the bestseller list and the local cinemas. There are some, no doubt, who do not think him a ‘serious’ author – but more often than not those are frustrated authors who secretly wish that they were as rich as he is.

Nevertheless, he is not perfect. In fact, I hesitate to call him great. Despite several blockbuster successes, he has had some real clunkers, too. We are all familiar with his work, though he is never mentioned in the same breath as Cormac McCarthy or Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal or even Tom Wolfe. No, Crichton’s name is more often associated with writers such as John Grisham or Stephen King. The point of this post, however, is not to examine why Grisham, King, or Crichton are not studied in classrooms, but rather to rank the novels of Crichton.

First, a couple of rules:

1. Movies are not taken into account. For instance, Timeline is a great novel, but an awful, awful movie. This will not count against it. Conversely, if Congo were a good movie (it’s not), it would not benefit the book’s ranking at all.
2. I can’t evaluate the science. Crichton will settle into a lengthy lecture on science to set up his plots, and I often skim it or skip some of it altogether. After all, I am not a scientist, and so am not equipped to judge whether it’s good or not.

With those ground rules established, let’s get to the rankings. Crichton has published 15* works of fiction, ranked below from 1-15, with some explanatory comments.

1. Jurassic Park – Must anything be said about this? Crichton’s tale of cloning and greed gone bad is a classic suspense novel. The first time I read it, I literally could not put it down. Cliché I know, but true.
2. Timeline – As a historian, though not a medieval one, this novel captured me from the start. Archaeology, history, knights fighting, I was hooked. So what if I still don’t understand all the quantum mechanics/multiverse gibberish? Once the group gets back in time, the book races at breakneck speed.
3. Airframe – Another novel read at one sitting, in a public library. This one is almost more of a mystery, with lots of fascinating insight into the aircraft building business. Underrated among Crichton novels.
4. Rising Sun – Another excellent mystery, set against the backdrop of Japanese-American business relations. Crichton’s somewhat strident rants against Japanese business practices aside, the novel is gripping and fast. Well worth a read.
5. Disclosure – a tale of sexual harassment in the IT industry without references to “hard drives” or “floppy disks.” Just a hard-hitting, scary story about how one guy can get screwed over, and how he fights back.
6. The Great Train Robbery – One of two real departures from the suspense genre, this reads more as an amusing tale set in Victorian England. A fun read, but not one to set the heart pounding.

 

Simmering Bethlehem

The Bethlehem Murders
Matt Rees

From an outside perspective, the Palestinian territories appear as cauldrons of simmering hostility. Despite the best efforts of diplomats and Presidents – Carter and Clinton chief among them – peace in the region seems ever more elusive. Complicating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the tension within the Palestinian community between Hamas and Fatah. These events dominate the news coverage of Palestinians, and Westerners are rarely treated to a more in-depth picture of the day-to-day life of ordinary Palestinians.

It is within these broad strokes that Matt Rees presents his rather ordinarily titled The Bethlehem Murders.* Rees, according to the dustjacket, covered the Middle East as a journalist for 10 years, and spent six of those as Time Magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief. So he writes from a position of experience.

Rees’ Palestine is run by gangsters who shoot rockets across the border into Israel, and intimidate fellow Palestinians into silence. These gunmen are unafraid to victimize Palestinians who are not sympathizers, and ordinary citizens are pawns in their political power plays. And not one Palestinian is immune to their brutal exercise of power. Notably, in Rees’ novel, the Israelis are but bit players. They impose when they must, and then they disappear. This is a Palestine victimized from without, but more disturbingly, from within.

Rees’ detective, Omar Yussef, is not a man blessed with any special skills or talents, but a devotion to his good friend George Saba, whom he believes has been falsely accused of murder. Yussef takes us through the warrens of Bethlehem, where we meet a variety of characters with a diversity of ideologies. Yussef himself is old, tired, and apathetic towards the Palestinian struggle, and his encounters with other characters bring color to what is often seen as black and white. In fact, one of the triumps of the book is the humanization of a Palestinians. We see people who just want to live their lives in peace, who just want to enjoy their marriages and their children and find reward in their work. There are also those committed to jihad, to the destruction of Israel, and two their own dishonest financial gain.

The plot possesses all of the conventions of a good detective novel, though some are executed clumsily. Some of the clumsiness may be attributed to Rees’ attempt to write from what is essentially a non-Western perspective, a very difficult task to accomplish successfully. Rees has done a marvelous job with this so far as I, a Westerner, can tell. Yussef is an eminently likeable character, and his charm kept me reading the book at some of the slower moments.

The Bethlehem Murders is a good illuminating read. One must always be wary of drawing conclusions about real life from fictional works, and this comes with the same caution. Nevertheless, its environment both sets it apart and drives my hearty recommendation.

* This is the title for the UK publication of the book, and the title of the version that I read. The US title is The Collaborator of Bethlehem, a rather better choice in my opinion.

 

Sira Rasul Allah

There are countless biographies on Muhammad. Not long ago I read Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad in HarperCollins’ Eminent Lives series. Its laughable subtitle is pretty indicative of the substance of the book: A Prophet for Our Time. And of course one should expect this sort of mushy-headed reasoning from Armstrong. I suppose that, for leftwing and rightwing fascists, Muhammad might have set some good precedents. But certainly not for those who don’t find conversion to Islam or subjugation under Islamic law particularly appealing.

There are other noteworthy biographies on Muhammad, too. Tariq Ramadan’s In the Footsteps of the Prophet is a highly readable book, penned by the west’s most famous public Muslim intellectual. If you want to get a glimpse of how a pious Muslim re-envisions the life of Muhammad, this is probably the book to read on the subject. From a historical standpoint, however, it doesn’t square well with the content contained in the earliest sources on Muhammad’s life.

This isn’t really all that surprising, though, for to recount everything in the earliest Muslim biographies would be to present a prophet who really isn’t for our time. As one should expect from any politico-military leader from the seventh century—particularly in the virtually lawless lands of the Arabian Peninsula—Muhammad comes off like a vicious warlord. Only this warlord was not a law unto himself. He allegedly took orders from God.

Few modern biographies examine Muhammad warts and all. Robert Spencer, however, has done a great service in this regard. In The Truth about Muhammad he carefully reconstructs the life of Muhammad as it’s found in the earliest Muslim sources. And he does so for a very good reason. Muhammad looms large in Muslim piety. Obviously! We recently witnessed what happens when you name a teddy bear Muhammad or choose to besmirch him in a cartoon. Imagine what would happen if Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ was matched with a Piss Muhammad, and it, too, was sponsored by the (totally unconstitutional yet federally funded) National Endowment for the Arts. Oh my! Moreover, Muslims are enjoined in the Quran to obey the Prophet. And if you ask a good devout Muslim, they will tell you that they seek nothing more than to emulate the example he set.

In any case, Spencer’s biography is excellent for getting a glimpse of the life of Muhammad as he is depicted in Muslim historical literature read by Muslims, not popular literature written by unwitting apologists for Islam or Muslims themselves designed to domesticate a seventh-century prophet who was raised up to, as Quran 9:33 says, cause Islam to dominate all other religions.

 

Understanding the Hadith

Understanding the Hadith
Ram Swarup

A Muslim friend of mind sometimes reminds me that westerners often do not grasp the nature of Islam. Islam is not a religion the way westerners conceive of religion, he tells me. Islam is an all-encompassing religion (or, perhaps more appropriately, an ideology) that overshadows everything. Islam dictates everything from how one is to use the toilet to how one should rule an empire and everything in between. In other words, Islam is especially a legal religion.

One cannot simply pick up a Quran and learn about the particulars of what it means to submit every aspect of your life to Allah, however. The Quran certainly contains legal prescriptions such as what you find in 4:34: “Men are the protectors and administrators of women, because God has given the one more strength than the other, and because they support them by their means. Therefore, righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in absence (of their husband) what Allah would have them guard. As to those women from whom you fear disloyalty and bad conduct: warn them, refuse to share their beds, and beat them.” There are of course other laws revealed in the Quran, but not enough to provide a legislative structure for dar al-Islam.

And Muslims don’t just arbitrarily make this up either. Before employing analogical or deductive reasoning to formulate laws not revealed in the Quran, they turn to a large collection of sayings and deeds of Muhammad that weren’t revealed through him by God. But because he was a prophet and, they would add, the most perfect man (how else could he bed 40 women in one night?), they are still in a sense revelatory. This collection of narratives describing how Muhammad responded to questions posed to him of a legal or ethical nature, how he dressed, and what he did in particular circumstances is referred to as the Sunna (tradition) of the prophet and each particular narrative is called a hadith.

To obtain a comprehensive understanding of Islam one absolutely has to be acquainted with the Sunna (or ahadith [plural for hadith]). The problem is that they are voluminous. The two most authoritative collections, Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, comprise nine and four volumes (respectively) in the modern Arabic-English editions. And they are an absolute bore to read, unless, of course, you are a Muslim jurist.

Ram Swarup has thus accomplished something tremendous in his summary of the contents of Sahih Muslim. Everything from Muslim articles of faith, ritual purification, prayer, taxation, fasting, pilgrimage, marriage and divorce, business and inheritance law, punishments for crime, jihad, government, hunting, food, drink, clothing, behavior, and much more are described in the 258 pages of Understanding the Hadith. Although Swarup is a Hindu, and occassionally his bias comes out in his critiques, all-in-all this is a great book for obtaining an overall contour of orthodox Islam. I dare say it’ll be an eye-opener for readers not already acquainted with the hadith.

 

Hypothetical Universalism, Real Scholarship

English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology

Jonathan D. Moore

Historical theology is, as its name implies, a hybrid discipline. Its practitioners usually favour one aspect over the other. Either theology predominates over history (that is, ideas over events and political manoeuvring and power bases) or vice versa. It is an unusual scholar who captures both history and theology, events and ideas, with equal effectiveness. My specialty, the English church from Henry VIII to the civil wars, seems currently to be dominated by historians. Diarmaid MacCulloch is a scholar in the field who combines historical and theological insights extraordinarily well, and the same can be said for rising star Alec Ryrie. And there are some others. But I have found most of the prominent scholars to be better historians than theologians.

As one for whom theology is more central than history, I find Jonathan D. Moore’s English Hypothetical Universalism to be a breath of fresh air. Moore takes on the conventional wisdom that the 17^th-century puritan divine John Preston was a Calvinist thinker of the William Perkins school, and blows it away. Specifically, Moore examines Preston’s beliefs about the extent of Christ’s atoning work (did Christ die for all in any meaningful sense of that word, or did he die only for those God elected from eternity?), comparing them and contrasting them with the particularist views of William Perkins. What is brilliant and, for a geek like me, exciting about Moore’s work is that his theological acumen is impeccable. He sees the interrelationships among doctrines and comes at the problem of the extent of the atonement from various theological angles. It is not just the divine decree of predestination that matters, but the death of Christ and the effect of the Gospel call on its various hearers. The result is a picture of Preston as a Calvinist thinker of a kinder, gentler sort. One who believes that Christ did indeed die for all. He was a hypothetical universalist – univeralist because Christ died for all, hypothetical because dying for all doesn’t necessarily mean saving all, for not all who hear the Gospel call are transformed by it.

Moore’s approach is sound and methodical. He analyzes his foil, Perkins, thoroughly. He then compares and contrasts Preston according to the same doctrinal categories, leading the reader inexorably to the conclusion that Preston was just who the author thinks he was. If hypothetical universalism were a crime and Moore a prosecutor, the jury of readers would convict Preston without deliberation.

But Moore does not stop there, he goes on to re-evaluate Preston’s role in the historic York House Conference of 1626 in light of this better understanding of Preston. Moore demonstrates that a correct understanding of a person’s ideas can and, at least in this case, should, colour one’s understanding of the person’s role in events.

English Hypothetical Universalism is a must-read for students of the early-Stuart church or of the history of puritan thought. It would also be a helpful book for those having a decent understanding of the doctrine of predestination who want to deepen and broaden their perspective. Moore’s methodical approach should be both accessible and educational for the informed lay person. Those seeking an introduction either to the doctrines surrounding predestination or to the early-Stuart church should bypass this rather more advanced work.

 

Marcus Luttrell, Lone Survivor

Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 is a tough read. It’s not that it is poorly written or terribly boring. Au contraire, it is engaging from the very beginning and, despite a few awkward turns of phrases, will captivate any reader. The reason it is such a tough read is because it is sure to evoke emotions and empathy from the most hardened reader.

 

The book is mostly autobiographical, recounting how a boy from east Texas eventually joined the United States Navy and made his way into its elite SEAL teams. But it especially focuses on a military operation he was part of in Afghanistan in which his entire reconnaissance team and a rescue party was killed by Taliban fighters.

 

Petty Officer Luttrell amazingly lived to tell the story. I don’t want to recount any more of it here though. It would never do justice to what Luttrell and his friends went through. If you want to know more about this hero and those who sacrificed their lives for their country, you’ll have to read it for yourself. You will not regret it.