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The Yellow Birds: A Novel, by Kevin Powers
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A novel written by a veteran of the war in Iraq, The Yellow Birds is the harrowing story of two young soldiers trying to stay alive.
"The war tried to kill us in the spring." So begins this powerful account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. Bound together since basic training when Bartle makes a promise to bring Murphy safely home, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for.
In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes actions he could never have imagined.
With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel that is destined to become a classic.
- Sales Rank: #99253 in Books
- Brand: Back Bay Books
- Published on: 2013-04-30
- Released on: 2013-04-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .75" w x 5.50" l, .52 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
- Back Bay Books
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, Debut Spotlight, September 2012: With The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers introduces himself as a writer of prodigious talent and ambition. The novel opens in 2004, when two soldiers, 21-year-old Bartle and the teenaged Murphy, meet in boot camp on the eve of their deployment to Iraq. Bartle, bound by a promise to Murphy's mother to guide him home safely, takes the young private under his wing as they move through the bloody conflict that "rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer." Powers, an Iraq veteran, eyes the casual violence of war with a poet's precision but without romanticism, moving confidently between scenes of blunt atrocity and almost hallucinatory detachment with Hemingway-like economy and prose that shimmers like desert heat. Compact and emotionally intense, The Yellow Birds joins a maturing and impressive collection of Iraq War literature--both memoir and fiction--that includes Brian Castner's The Long Walk and Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. --Jon Foro
Review
"The All Quiet on the Western Front of America's Arab wars."―Tom Wolfe
"The Yellow Birds is harrowing, inexplicably beautiful, and utterly, urgently necessary."―Ann Patchett
"A remarkable first novel...The Yellow Birds is brilliantly observed and deeply affecting: at once a freshly imagined bildungsroman about a soldier's coming of age, a harrowing story about the friendship of two young men trying to stay alive on the battlefield in Iraq, and a philosophical parable about the loss of innocence and the uses of memory...Extraordinary."―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"This is a novel I've been waiting for. The Yellow Birds is born from experience and rendered with compassion and intelligence."―Alice Sebold
"Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds is written with an intensity which is deeply compelling; every moment, every memory, every object, every move, are conjured up with a fierce and exact concentration and sense of truth."―Colm Toibin
"Compelling, brilliantly written, and heart-breakingly true, The Yellow Birds belongs in the same category as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. Thus far the definitive novel of our long wars in the Middle East; this book is certain to be read and taught for generations to come."―Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust
"A novel about the poetry and the pity of war...Powers writes with a rawness that brings the sights and smells as well as the trauma and decay of war home to the reader."―Kirkus
"Reading The Yellow Birds I became certain that I was in the presence of a text that will win plaudits, become a classic, and hold future narratives of the war to a higher standard....a superb literary achievement."―Chris Cleave
"Kevin Powers has delivered an exceptional novel from the war in Iraq, written in clean, evocative prose, lyric and graphic, in assured rhythms, a story for today and tomorrow and the next."―Daniel Woodrell
"Powers has created a powerful work of art that captures the complexity and life altering realities of combat service. This book will endure. Read it and then put it way up on that high rare shelf alongside Ernest Hemingway and Tim O'Brien."―Anthony Swofford
"We haven't just been waiting for a great novel to come out of the Iraq War, our 21st century Vietnam; we have also been waiting for something more important, a work of art that illuminates our flawed and complex and striving humanity behind all such wars. At last we have both in Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds."―Robert Olen Butler
"Thoughtful and analytical, the novel resonates as an accurate and deeply felt portrayal of the effects of post-combat syndrome as experienced by soldiers in the disorienting war in Iraq. "―Library Journal, starred review
"This moving debut from Powers (a former Army machine gunner) is a study of combat, guilt, and friendship forged under fire....Powers's style and story are haunting."―Publisher's Weekly, starred review
About the Author
Kevin Powers is the author of The Yellow Birds, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and was a National Book Award Finalist. He was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, and holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. He served in the US Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar. This is his first collection of poetry.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Felt cheated out of what should have been a good novel
By Robert Jacoby
It’s hard to say exactly why I’m so disappointed with this novel. It may be because there was so much build-up around it, so I came in with very high (too high) hopes. It won high praise from many critics, and it won several awards. I’ll admit that’s partly why I read the book. I do pay attention to what people are saying. (Heck, it was a National Book Award finalist!) So I came in really wanting to like and enjoy this book.
It started nicely, poetically, a bit oddly muted and muddled. Less than a quarter of the way through I was beginning to feel like there was a bait and switch going on. The characters, the story, the scenes, the writing… I wasn’t connecting. And I really wanted to. Like Mr. Powers, I’m a poet and a novelist, so I know the skills he’s bringing to bear here. I get his writing, his writing style, and I can appreciate it for what he was trying to do.
First, I didn’t connect to the characters (and there are only *three* of them). They read undeveloped to me. I wasn’t feeling who they are, so I wasn’t caring for them very much as they were going through their “story.”
Which brings us to problem number 2: there’s not much story here. We have 11 chapters, alternating in time and space, over 226 pages. It is a short novel. Told in a first person point of view, the narrator wedges in bits of his memories from the fields and odd encounters with the enemy in Iraq and then back to his return and trying to “fit in” in his home town in Virginia. But he feels out of place. And I do, too, as a reader.
Another problem for me was the scenes in the book. The scenes the narrator was describing did not make me feel as if I were there with him experiencing the events in his story. Mr. Powers’ gift with language was his weakness, too, because it felt sometimes like Mr. Powers, the writer, was getting in the way of Private Bartle, the storyteller.
There was some nice writing, sure. But there was a lot of writing that just rambled, for no apparent reason. And sometimes at the strangest moments, so much so that it felt like Powers had to reel himself back in from his own tangents. I have no problem with stream-of-consciousness writing, but the stream should lead somewhere. At other times the language (similes, metaphors, ramblings) Powers uses just gets in the way because of its strangeness. I mean, there was writing I stumbled over--that, really, just stopped the book for me. For example: “Clouds spread out over the Atlantic like soiled linens on an unmade bed” (p. 99). My first thought when I read this was: Huh? I had to re-read it. And not for pleasure. Because my next thought was: Ewww. And using Vonnegut’s “So it goes” (p. 135). I almost set the book aside when I read that because I thought: He really just re-used *that* line? And: “We trickled out into the city like water rung from a mop” (p. 194). What? “from a mop”? Writing should draw me into the novel and make me experience what the characters are experiencing, not make me look up and think: “What the hell?”
There are also some bits that seem really disjointed (as other reviewers have pointed out), as if the text was in need of a good editor: birds flying out of an orchard that’s just been shelled to pieces; a woman standing motionless for hours—hours!—upon hearing of her son’s death; dark night suddenly becoming the dawn.
Finally, for me, the story felt strangely heartless, oddly soulless. I was hoping (intending) to finish the book with a better understanding—a better feeling—of war. A character spent a page describing his experience of war (like the moment suspended before a car accident), but I felt none of that while reading this book. Instead, the book felt rushed and undone, incoherent and incomplete. I wanted to know more because, at the end of it all, at the reveal of the “big, traumatic event,” I felt robbed of knowing. I felt the author owed me more. And I felt cheated out of what should have been a good novel, if not a great novel, about the *experience* of our most modern war.
“Did not like it”
2 stars Amazon
1 star Goodreads
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Petey's bookies
By James H. Dean
I am so pleased I was asked to review this novel as I felt I had a lot to say about it that would hopefully help a future reader. I purchased the novel because I had never read a Iraq war novel and wanted to familiarize myself with this experience our country is going through. I was sorely disappointed in the novel. Some reviews state that the prose is "beautiful" and "poetic." The poetic description is the downfall of the otherwise potentially good book. I mean really, does a dying American soldier ask those tending to him if he "s***" his pants? I believe he may have asked if he s*** his pants however. Defining the littered streets of this particular town in Iraq as filled with "detritus" when he could have described what was in the streets, or referred to it as garbage. Another excuse to use his poetic abilities. I also felt highly manipulated with the story taking place in the present and then drifting to the past, to the boy's home town in the South. With this shift came page upon page of meandering poetic descriptions of the flora, fauna, babbling brooks, sun shining through leaves of trees, etc. yet another opportunity to show his poetic skill. I found myself skipping these pages mid way through the novel. When I am told I am purchasing a war novel, I expect to read a story of the brutality of war; how it brings out the worst in us, how we are forced to do things that normally would contradict our values and morals and even how it brings out the best in us, However Mr. Powers seemed more intent on showing us how lovely he can write and the story was not entertaining or informing. He took an old premise; that war changes men, and trivialized it with flowery language almost as though he was cleaning it up for the reader.I was very disappointed in this novel and would not recommend it to others for reading.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
"All's Quiet on the Western Front" it is not
By JoeI
Yellow Birds has been hailed the war novel of its general. This is an extreme overstatement. Although fictional, this novel has many inaccuracies about the military to the point of distraction. More importantly, the author turns soldiers into cartoonish stereotypes that only widen the gap between civilian society and the military. As a member of the National Guard during wartime, the author would have done a greater service by focusing on the struggles and accomplishments of citizen soldiers during this trying time. The author probably had a better, more authentic story to tell rather than the fantasy tale he created. What is ironic and bothersome is that gap between civilian society and the military is exposed not by the novel itself but by the reaction to the novel as the defining narrative of our most recent wars.
Having said this, the novel has two positive points. The author does make great use of imagery. There is a sense of the oppressiveness of combat situations to the vastness of civilian society with the wonder, isolation and confusion that comes with it. Additionally, this novel is a good coming of age of novel. The reader is able to see how the protagonist makes sense out of life. His journey of self-discovery is simply against the context of war. The coming of age perspective is my recommendation for approaching "Yellow Birds". It does justice to both the book and the military experience.
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