Perhaps I just need to stay away from award-winning bestsellers. But sometimes, my curiosity over all those stickers, prizes, and multiplying sales just can’t be contained … and then I get trapped in a vacuum of disappointment and tedium from which I’m stubbornly unable to extract myself. A problem of my own making, I realize, and still I haven’t learned my lesson, egads!
For those of you aren’t yet convinced about picking up this massively-hailed debut novel, allow me to suggest these recent war narratives as preferable choices: Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil or The Blind Man’s Garden, Stephen Dau’s The Book of Jonas, or even Harry Mazer and Peter Lerangis’ Somebody, Please Tell Me Who I Am for young adult readers. In comparison, Yellow Birds is a testosterone-fueled rant lacking the elegance, nuance, and subtlety that define other, exceptional titles. [For those who choose the audible route, narrator Holter Graham fuels the 'angry young man'-role with convincing relish.] That said, Birds is surely the latest necessary testimony to the hopeless waste of war; perhaps that reason alone is spiking its sales.
Two soldiers are headed to Iraq, having enlisted in a faraway crusade they don’t fully understand. In a moment buzzing with high emotion just before deployment, the narrator, John Bartle, makes an impossible promise to the mother of a younger soldier, Daniel Murphy, that he would take care of her son. At 21 and 18, respectively, Bartle and Murph, are as yet barely grown men – their struggle to survive the brutal warzone will prove to be an even greater battle to hold on to their humanity.
The opening epigraph – and titular inspiration – perfectly encapsulates the unrelenting contents that follow: “A yellow bird / With a yellow bill / Was perched upon / My windowsill // I lured him in / With a piece of bread / And then I smashed / His f**king head … / — Traditional U.S. Army Marching Cadence.” For the wary, that might have been enough warning to choose an alternative read. Clearly, I wasn’t paying enough attention from the very beginning … I mindlessly marched on toward grave consequences.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012
“Hadiya’s name is not really Hadiya,” the editor’s note introduces this harrowing, heartbreaking blog-turned-book. “We have used pseudonyms for every Iraqi in this story because each of their lives could be in danger if they were identified. But Hadiya is a real teenager in Mosul, and this is her story.”
Eight stories about eight teens from eight different countries coming of age during a time of uncertainty and tumult in their native Middle East countries. In the title story, young Amal of Baghdad, Iraq, must find the very best gift for her departing literature teacher even while watching as her family’s already depleted resources continue to dwindle. In “Faces,” Suhayl of Syria comes to terms with his parents’ divorce, desperately hoping to make his mother happy once again.
Despite the bombs falling from the sky, a devoted librarian manages to safely rescue thousands of books before the library burns down. An inspiring tale for anyone who loves books … not to mention a testament to the absolute importance of safeguarding all our literary treasures.
While the premise of a young girl’s diary about surviving war in contemporary Iraq is promising – if not necessary in order to put an innocent human face to the so-called ‘war on terrorism’ – this title proves ultimately disappointing. The writing seems to be overly manufactured, almost hiding behind a false veneer, as if the writer is only too aware of an audience on the other side of the BBC cameras that first presented her story to the media. The final entry is most telling with “I have to go now. It’s time for me to write another diary about different things, not to be published, but for me to leave to my children one day.” Too bad we don’t have access to those pages.
“When people asked me if I would edit an updated edition of Iraq Under Siege, my answer has always been ‘no’ – that I hoped the book would soon become historically obsolete …,” writes Arnove in his introduction to the 2002 version of his 2000 original. Tragically, “it is more relevant today than when it was first published” – in spite of the fact that no connections between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks were ever made. Minor detail, I’m sure. If only we could get Dubya and all his cronies to read it!
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