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Book Reviewed by:"The Iliad of the Iraq war" (Tim Weiner) - a gut-wrenching, beautiful memoir of the consequences of war on the psyche of a young man.
Eat the Apple is a daring, twisted, and darkly hilarious story of American youth and masculinity in an age of continuous war. Matt Young joined the Marine Corps at age eighteen after a drunken night culminating in wrapping his car around a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases charged with making him a Marine. Matt survived the training and then not one, not two, but three deployments to Iraq, where the testosterone, danger, and stakes for him and his fellow grunts were dialed up a dozen decibels.
With its kaleidoscopic array of literary forms, from interior dialogues to infographics to prose passages that read like poetry, Young's narrative powerfully mirrors the multifaceted nature of his experience. Visceral, ironic, self-lacerating, and ultimately redemptive, Young's story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the absurdism of 21st-century war, the manned-up vulnerability of those on the front lines, and the true, if often misguided, motivations that drove a young man to a life at war.
Searing in its honesty, tender in its vulnerability, and brilliantly written, Eat the Apple is a modern war classic in the making and a powerful coming-of-age story that maps the insane geography of our times.
Eat the Apple showcases memoir as an art form. Young deploys excellent and varied literary skills here, both to witness contemporary military service, and to heal from his tours of duty...continued
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(Reviewed by Karen Lewis).
The United States military draft ended under Nixon in 1973 as the Vietnam conflict wound down. Since then, recruitment has been entirely voluntary. Aspiring soldiers usually go through an enlistment process, like Matt Young did in Eat the Apple. Service choices include: Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, Air Force, or National Guard.
The US Army is the largest branch of service. In addition to combat jobs, the Army supports active medical, nursing and dental corps, along with along with Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG Corp) and the Army Corps of Engineers. The active-duty service requirement for enlisted soldiers ranges from 2-6 years. Medical corps involves a longer commitment.
The Navy began in 1775 and has evolved along with ...
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David Abrams, author of Fobbit and Brave Deeds
Matt Young's Eat the Apple is a standout in a crowded room full of war memoirs. It's fresh, invigorating, and brutally honest in a scorched-earth kind of way.
