Booktalk

I just finished reading The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers. It is a brutally beautiful book about one soldier's journey to reconcile his experience in America's Arab war. The moral battle within the soldier is only slightly less horrifying than the measureless horrors of actual war within which he must blindly obey or physically perish.

That the language is so beautiful where the story is so harsh enables the author to investigate large questions even amid the urgency and chaos of the moments he creates.

Time, place, memory, regret are wonderfully woven together as in this passage near the end:

That map, like every other, would soon be out of date, if it was not already.  What had been indexed to was only an idea of place, an abstraction formed from memories too brief and passing to account for the small effects of time: wind scouring and lifting the dust of the plains of Nineveh in immeasurable increments, the tuck of the river farther into its bend, hour by hour, year by year; the map would become less and less a picture of a fact and more a poor translation of memory into two dimensions. It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn’t much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow.