The Yellow Birds

Apr 21, 2013 Richard rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Yellow Birds wins the 2012 Guardian First Book Award! Review can now be found at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Sep 29, 2012 Jeffrey Keeten rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jeffrey by: Mike Sullivan

"THE WAR TRIED to kill us in the spring. As green greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into he windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. I...more

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Apr 11, 2013 Fionnuala rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Yellow Birds is a fictionalised account of a young American soldier’s experiences while on a tour of duty in Iraq in 2004. That this book has been published and is getting a wide readership is important because any and every account, in whatever medium, which underlines the absurdity of war is needed urgently until the sending out of young men to fight senseless wars becomes a thing of the past.

Powers was 17 when he joined the army and what I'd really like to have read is his diary from that...more

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Oct 20, 2012 Lou rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: arc

The inundated reports of wars and turmoil in the middle-east have created blind eyes and death ears to many as the death toll ever increases and people have lost count on the fallen.
Death seems to not be noticed as much as it should, except that is, for those that have lost loved ones of kin, love, and friendship in these wars plaguing the earth. This story could possibly win the attention of those guilty of this and make the dead count for those readers in the alien region of understanding this...more The inundated reports of wars and turmoil in the middle-east have created blind eyes and death ears to many as the death toll ever increases and people have lost count on the fallen.
Death seems to not be noticed as much as it should, except that is, for those that have lost loved ones of kin, love, and friendship in these wars plaguing the earth. This story could possibly win the attention of those guilty of this and make the dead count for those readers in the alien region of understanding this dilemma, you feel the loss the confusion and the betrayal of this unending war in this wonderful stringed together story of fiction that could not be far from truths of the occurrences in the Iraq of recent years. This writer knows the battlefield as he served as a gunner in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, you feel the terrain in the unrelenting unforgiving desert and the human emotion coupled with the bloody reality of the task the main protagonist had before him.
The author writes of the main protagonist in chapters that alternate from being in Iraq serving with a close buddy Murphy and being in Virginia out of the army. The main protagonist reflections are heart felt and thought provoking and you can’t avoid thinking that the authors actual real experiences and feelings have some play in the content that is categorised as fiction. Just the right number of pages and chapters sizes made this a one seating read that just hooks you in from its beginning to its end. His sentences describe the environment eloquently and exactly like you are there in his shoes which immerses you in the whole story. A memorable story with two key memorable men that will linger in your mind and hopeful not be forgotten as a tragedy and a story of many peoples struggle with war.
Thanks to a very capable writer whose survived a world no one would wish to return to or wish upon your enemy or any another soul to partake in.

“While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire.
Then, in summer, the war tried to kill us as the heat blanched all color from the plains. The sun pressed into our skin, and the war sent its citizens rustling into the shade of white buildings. It cast a white shade on everything, like a veil over our eyes. It tried to kill us every day, but it had not succeeded. Not that our safety was preordained. We were not destined to survive. The fact is, we were not destined at all. The war would take what it could get. It was patient. It didn’t care about objectives, or boundaries, whether you were loved by many or not at all. While I slept that summer, the war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on. And I knew the war would have its way.”

“War is the great maker of solipsists: how are you going to save my life today? Dying would be one way. If you die, it becomes more likely that I will not. You’re nothing, that’s the secret: a uniform in a sea of numbers, a number in a sea of dust. And we somehow thought those numbers were a sign of our own insignificance. We thought that if we remained ordinary, we would not die. We confused correlation with cause and saw a special significance in the portraits of the dead, arranged neatly next to the number corresponding to their place on the growing list of casualties we read in the newspapers, as indications of an ordered war.”

“It was far too dark to see into it, but the images were there like an etching through the night. The stench of the dead had cut itself free from the odors coming from Al Tafar. The trash fires and sewage, the heavy scent of cured lamb, the river; above all this was the stink of decay from the bodies themselves. A shudder ran through my shoulders, a quick shake, as I hoped not to step into the slick mess of one of them as we marched to the fight.”

“When the mortars fell, the leaves and fruit and birds were frayed like ends of rope. They lay on the ground in scattered piles, torn feathers and leaves and the rinds of broken fruit intermingling. The sunlight fell absently through the spaces in the treetops, here and there glistening as if on water from smudges of bird blood and citrus.”

“Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn’t any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill then and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you’re taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you gonna do?, but really it doesn’t matter because by the end you foiled at the one good thing you could have done, the one person you promised would live is dead, and you have seen all things die in more manners than you’d like to recall and for a while the whole thing fucking ravaged your spirit like some deep-down shit, man, that you didn’t even realise you had until only the animals made you sad, the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the fucking guts and everything stinking like metal and burning garbage and you walk around and the smell is deep down into you now and you say, How can metal be so on fire? and Where is all this ******* trash coming from? and even back home you’re getting whiffs of it and then that thing you started to notice slipping away is gone and now it’s becoming inverted, like you have bottomed out in your spirit but yet a deeper hole is being dug because everybody is so fucking happy to see you, the murderer, the ******* accomplice, the at-bare-minimum bearer of some ******* responsibility, and everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddamn country down, you want to burn every goddamn yellow ribbon in sight, and you can’t explain it but its just, like, Fuck you, but then you signed up to go so it’s all your fault, really, because you went on a purpose, so you are in the end doubly f*****, so why not just find a spot and curl up and die and lets make it as painless as possible because you are a coward and, really, cowardice got you into this mess because you wanted to be a man and people made fun of you and pushed you around in the cafeteria and the hallways in high school because you liked to read books and poems sometimes and they’d call you a fag and really deep down you know you went because you wanted to be a man and that’s never gonna happen now and you’re too much of a coward to be a man and get it over with so why not find a clean, dry place and wait it out with it hurting as little as possible and just wait to go to sleep and not wake up and fu**’em all.”

"The dominoes of moments, lined up symmetrically, then tumbling backward against the hazy and unsure push of cause, showed only that a fall is every objects destiny. It is not enough to say what happened.
Everything happened. Everything fell.”

“I took my woobie out of my pack and covered him. I couldn’t look anymore. Most of us had seen death in many forms: the slick mess after a suicide bomber, headless bodies gathered in a ditch like a collection of broken dolls on a child’s shelf, even our own boys sometimes, bleeding and crying as it became apparent that the sound of a casevac was thirty seconds too far in the distance. But none of us had seen this.”
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Sep 16, 2012 Jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jennifer by: Blue Willow

Shelves: own, 2012, saw-author-2012

In the last decade or so, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone left untouched in some fashion by Iraq or Afghanistan, whether it be through a family member, friend, neighbor, colleague, or acquaintance. To be honest, I’m really not sure why I chose to read this book. Maybe it was because my brother was deployed for twenty-two months in Iraq and never really talked too much in depth about it. He did express a deep and abiding hatred of the enemy (“hajji”) in a classic “us” vs. “them” mentalit...more
In the last decade or so, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone left untouched in some fashion by Iraq or Afghanistan, whether it be through a family member, friend, neighbor, colleague, or acquaintance. To be honest, I’m really not sure why I chose to read this book. Maybe it was because my brother was deployed for twenty-two months in Iraq and never really talked too much in depth about it. He did express a deep and abiding hatred of the enemy (“hajji”) in a classic “us” vs. “them” mentality. If my brother did speak of some experience or another, sometimes I felt like covering my ears like a child and shouting “LA-LA-LA-LA!” because I didn’t want to truly know. I don’t think I was ready to fully process my brother’s experiences as he experienced them, and this book afforded me a way of doing so without being too close.

Prior to deployment to northwestern Iraq, Pvt. John Bartle’s sergeant introduces him to Pvt. Daniel Murphy and leaves Murph with the instruction “All right little man, I want you to get in Bartle’s back pocket, and I want you to stay there.” Bartle is in his early twenties and Murph is still a teenager, but Bartle comes across as a worldly, more experienced older brother. Powers doesn’t delve too much into the friendship between the two in the context of such a harsh setting, partly because Bartle has the benefit of hindsight and doesn’t want to get too close. One of the most striking aspects of the story is these soldiers are so young, and they are being forced to make hard decisions about life and death on a daily basis.

This is a story of truth in war told through a series of Bartle’s flashbacks. Almost 90% of the story takes place in Bartle’s mind in which he tries to make sense of things that have happened to him. The funny thing about memory is it cannot be controlled. Some experiences are just too immediate and intense. What is “The Truth?” Does The Truth really lie in memory where “facts” have become jumbled, overlapped, and hazy? Throughout the book, Bartle seeks to make sense of things – to make his experiences add up. Through his damaged memory, Bartle tries to reconstruct Murph, and he fails. Powers isn’t aiming for accuracy in war, but to paint a picture of when memory fails and things are simply unfixable.

While I argue the book could have used more character development, the secondary characters of the mothers were beautifully written. Families are courageous in their own unique way and must deal with loss and the powerlessness of what happens when a loved one returns home damaged. Powers addresses the difficulty veterans have when returning to “normal” life once they return home from war. I found the flashback method difficult to follow at times. Powers is a poet. War isn’t poetic or flowery; it is horrifying, gritty, and tragic. I wasn’t looking for a thriller, but I could have done without so much pretty language. With that said, The Yellow Birds is a powerful and moving debut novel.

I saw Powers speak early on his book tour when he made a stop at the Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston. One of the more interesting points to come up was “why a novel instead of a memoir?” Powers is an Iraqi veteran himself after serving in 2004 and 2005 as a machine gunner. Surely he would have more than enough to present first-hand? Powers responded that he was able to process his experiences through his imagination. For him, writing this book provided distance and clarity. It also gave him much more freedom of expression and creative control to say things that he normally would not. He is an “artist ordering the universe.” Had Powers written a memoir, he would have been responsible for the story of all those serving with him – and that takes time.

So what’s next for Mr. Powers? First, a collection of poetry. And his next novel? Powers was a bit more speculative, but he hinted that he was at the note-taking stage of a story of a plantation owner during the Civil War era. He threw out that it could involve a “love triangle” and “murder,” but warned it could “go anywhere.” This could be interesting…
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Mar 07, 2013 Marsha rated it 2 of 5 stars

First off, I want to say that the problem with this book is probably with me. Many deeper, more thoughtful readers loved it, and I might have enjoyed it more if I was in the mood for a book I had to really concentrate on and think about, and if I had someone there to explain all the lyrical, beautifully written, but somewhat confusing prose. I had to keep rereading, but even now I am not sure of what happened or why in parts of the book. It is the story of a soldier serving in Iraq in 2004. He h...more First off, I want to say that the problem with this book is probably with me. Many deeper, more thoughtful readers loved it, and I might have enjoyed it more if I was in the mood for a book I had to really concentrate on and think about, and if I had someone there to explain all the lyrical, beautifully written, but somewhat confusing prose. I had to keep rereading, but even now I am not sure of what happened or why in parts of the book. It is the story of a soldier serving in Iraq in 2004. He has foolishly, and a bit flippantly, promised a mother to take care of her son, with whom he serves. It turns out that nobody can keep anyone safe. The consequences of that promise, along with the fear, isolation, and craziness of war, are what make up the story. The story itself, was secondary to the immediate environment and the inner muse of the main character. Maybe that is why the story was somewhat hard to follow, and a bit anti-climactic. Here is an example of the writing:

"Clouds spread out over the Atlantic like soiled linens on an unmade bed. I knew, watching them, that if in any given moment a measurement could be made it would show how tentative was my mind's mastery over my heart. Such small arrangements make a life, and though it's hard to get close to saying what the heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those parentheses which were the beginning and the end of my war: the old life disappearing into the dust that hung and hovered over Nineveh even before it could be recalled and longed for, young and unformed as it was, already broken by the time I reached the furthest working of my memory. I was going home. But home, too, was hard to get an image of, harder still to think beyond the last curved enclosure of the desert, where it seemed I had left the better portion of my self as one among innumerable grains of sand, how in the end the weather-beaten stone is not one stone but only that which has been weathered, a result, an example of slow erosion on a thing by wind or wave that break against it, so that the else of anyone involved ends up deposited like silt spilling out into an estuary, or gathered at the bottom of a river in a city that is all you can remember."

See, beautifully written and lyrical, but I still am not quite sure what it means. I had a hard time knowing, understanding, or caring deeply about the characters because I never understood quite what was being said and the story was so jumpy and inconclusive. The author is a poet and served in Iraq as a machine gunner in 2004-2005. He is obviously a talented writer and knows his subject matter, I just needed the story to be a bit more clear. I really wanted to like it...(less)

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Mar 02, 2013 Dan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: literature, read-in-2012

This is the second of three books about or related to our recent wars in the middle east released this year. The first I read was the masterful Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and the final one, Fobbit, I'll get to in the next month or so.

Unlike the two I've just mentioned The Yellow Birds is very serious. I didn't find a drop of humor within it's pages. What I did find was a serious rumination on what it means to go to war, and how we're left to deal with the choices we make. The book is inten...more

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Jan 31, 2013 Camilla ~ ♥Qhuay At Last♥ ~ rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle

I’ve been sitting here thinking about what I want to write and tell you about this book, but it’s really.. really hard.. The storyline in itself isn’t that hard.

It’s told from John’s POV. He’s thinking back to when he was in the military and stationed in Iraq in 2004/05. He’s thinking about his friend Murph and how a war can change a person.

This in itself isn’t that hard to explain, but I find it really hard to figure out if I liked it or not. And how do I review a book if I don’t even know if I...more

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May 15, 2013 Stephen rated it 5 of 5 stars

First thing I will say is that George Bush and his ilk should read this book, checked out from the prison library. To say the novel is powerful is an understatement The prose is elegant in its simplicity and ability to drag you kicking and screaming into the character's lives - you do not want to read it because you know something bad and disgusting is going to happen and it does and you read it and it is drilled into you head - in living color and smell. You can hear it too. It is the story of...more

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Mar 06, 2013 Pamela Huxtable rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-fiction

I believe this is an important book, especially for those of us who have never had direct experience with the US led wars of the past decade. War literature of the past has always seemed to me to include effort on the part of the civilians left behind, partcularly World War II stories.. With the war in Iraq, there is no story of civilians left behind; there is only the heat, the desert, and the blood. Blood of American boys and girls -please note I do NOT say men and women - blood of Iraqi civil...more

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Feb 06, 2013 Alicen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: recommended

I read this book as part of my ongoing attempt to read books written about our current wars and was interested in this book as a novel about the Iraq war. Like many of the books I have read to date on this topic (i.e. The Long Walk) the narrative often felt sparse and the characters distant. This doesn't mean I didn't like the book - on the contrary I thought it was very moving - but it makes for a very different reading experience and didn't allow me to fully connect with what the characters we...more

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Jan 28, 2013 Vicki rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: library-books, novels

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. So that E.M. Forster quote jumps into my head a lot on Goodreads ("One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it."), but my personal variation on that theme is that I always tend to criticize an overpraised book. That's what is about to happen in this review, so if you loved this book to pieces, I'm happy for you. This isn't the review for you.

This book was not bad. It wasn't. The last third in particular really tightened up, and I cared about the main character and...more So that E.M. Forster quote jumps into my head a lot on Goodreads ("One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it."), but my personal variation on that theme is that I always tend to criticize an overpraised book. That's what is about to happen in this review, so if you loved this book to pieces, I'm happy for you. This isn't the review for you.

This book was not bad. It wasn't. The last third in particular really tightened up, and I cared about the main character and thought the structure was interesting and effective. Some of the language was lovely. But here's what. From the cover: "The Yellow Birds is written with an intensity which is deeply compelling; every moment, every memory, every object, every move, is conjured up with a fierce and exact concentration and sense of truth." "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." "The minute I read Kevin Powers's marvelous first sentence, I knew I was in the hands of an exceptional writer. That line is right up there with 'Call me Ishmael.' The best books transcend their time and circumstances to say something enduring and truthful about war itself. The Yellow Birds belongs in that category." "The All Quite on the Western Front of America's Arab Wars." I'm sorry, the AQotWF? For serious?!

From the pages:

"I was very tired and the blur of the silver trees on the side of the road became a comfort that described both newness and continuity at once."

"I knew, watching them, that if in any given moment a measurement could be made it would show how tentative was my mind's mastery over my heart. Such small arrangements make a life, and though it's hard to get close to saying what the heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those parentheses which were the beginning and the end of my war: the old life disappearing into the dust that hung and hovered over Ninevah even before it could be recalled and longed for, young and unformed as it was, already broken by the time I reached the furthest working of my memory."

"It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of a poorly designed experiment in inevitablility. Everything was in its proper place, waiting for a pause in in time, for the source of all momentum to be stilled, so that what remained would be nothing more than detritus to be tallied up."

What do these quotes have in common? Well, what they have in common is that they sound kind of pretty, but then when you take a second look, they're word salad. And I know that Powers has an MFA in poetry, but he's the one who chose to write a novel, so I'm going to need his sentences to have meaning. Did the comfort describe newness to you? Did it also describe continuity? Both, and at once? Does comfort describe? No, no it does not. If your heart has meaning, it's the dawn of time in pre-civilization Iraq? Of course, that makes sense. No, wait, it does not. Let's talk about your inevitability experiment. What are you trying to say here? The pieces (soldiers about to go into the orchard) are in place waiting for a break in the action (forward march of time? Possibly, but doesn't seem like it, the war itself?) to tally what remains? But the detritus that you're talking about is clearly the soldiers, who are also the pieces waiting on the sidelines of this momentum machine that will have to pause to get to the tallying. How are they waiting to take their place but already detritus? How is the action happening without them? Why don't your sentences make sense once they're unpacked?!

And for the first two-thirds of the book, I'd say every sixth sentence was like this. Overly simile-ed (every third thing "seemed like it was happening underwater"), full to bursting with descriptions that are either superfluous or make next-to-no sense ("ruddy mackerel sky"? Stahhp. "bile rose up, raw and acidic"? Yeah, that's bile, all right. It's raw and acidic). If this book were written by a woman, the reviews would be about lack of restraint, purple prose, you name it. But because it's written by a man, and not just any man, but a War Fightin' Man, it's deep? Ohh, he has emotions! I'm bowled over by the ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT OF OUR TIMES (nope, still not over that one). I can't tell if it's pure sexism (Man has emotions; is the hero of our times!) or some kind of class-based condescension (Army grunt can write in complete sentences; is the hero of our times!), or possibly just plain old-fashioned American military fetishism (book written by member of Army; goes without saying author is hero of our times!), but the overpraise rubbed me the wrong way from the jump, and then each time I came across a bit like these it set my teeth on edge.

This book is not crap. It's really not. It deserves some praise, just not the outpouring it received. You should read it; it's quick and pretty powerful. Here's a bit I liked (from the last third, obvs):

Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn't any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you're taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you going to do?, but really it doesn't matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done, the one person you promised would live is dead, and you have seen all things die in more manners than you'd like to recall and for a while the whole thing fucking ravaged your spirit like some deep-down shit, man, that you didn't even realize you had until only the animals made you sad, the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the fucking guts and everything stinking like metal and burning garbage and you walk around and the smell is deep down into you know and you say, How can metal be so on fire? and Where is all this fucking trash coming from? and even back home you're getting whiffs of it and then that thing you started to notice slipping away is gone and now it's becoming inverted, like you have bottomed out in your spirit but yet a deeper hole is being dug because everybody is so fucking happy to see you, the murderer, the fucking accomplice, the at-bare-minimum bearer of some fucking responsibility, and everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddamn country down, you want to burn every goddamn yellow ribbon in sight, and you can't explain it but it's just, like, Fuck you, but then you signed up to go so it's all your fault, really, becuase you went on purpose, so you are in the end doubly fucked, so why not just find a spot and curl up and die and let's make it as painless as possible because you are a coward and, really, cowardice got you into this mess because you wanted to be a man and people made fun of you and pushed you around in the cafeteria and the hallways in high school because you liked to read books and poems sometimes and they'd call you fag and really deep down you know you went becuase you wanted to be a man and that's never gonna happen now and you're too much of a coward to be a man and get it over with so why not find a clean, dry place and wait it out with it hurting as little as possible and just wait to go to sleep and not wake up and fuck 'em all.

There was good stuff like that in there, solid, edited, clean, meaningful writing. I just wish I wasn't distracted from it as often as I was. 3.5 stars.(less)

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Jan 01, 2013 Charles rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I found this book to be more poetry than prose. The words flowed, sometimes like a small stream, and sometimes in a giant current, a wave of emotions and feelings and views and reminiscences and of people and places and smells. I was swept away in this current.

The plot is minimal. I could summarize it in a sentence, which I have no plans to do. The timeline is discontinuous, bouncing from present to recent past to more distant past. This is an important part of the narrative, composed of loosely...more

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Feb 24, 2013 Lillian rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013-tournament-of-books

This book will break your heart, but I loved the writing. You know from the start that any novel that deals with young U.S. soldiers in Iraq is going to be a downer, but this left me feeling like all the pain I vicariously went through with the main character was worth something ... and also very grateful that I have not really experienced any of this but full of sorrow for those who have. I saw this headline today in the satirical online newspaper, The Onion: "Nation Horrified To Learn About Wa...more

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Aug 17, 2012 Tori rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Contrary to most of the other reviewers, I loved this. Absence of strict plot does not a bad novel make.

It is certainly more poetic than books that are strictly categorized as novels these days. I think war stories in particular benefit from a more poetic, stream-of-consciousness type writing. Seldom does war itself follow a strict plot line, why would war literature do so.

Characters may be deemed somewhat lacking, but the story isn't really about them, it's about the experience, and I think P...more

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Feb 18, 2013 Rihab rated it 3 of 5 stars

I really wanted to give this book a 4 stars rating and to be honest I intended to do so but Powers keeps repeating the same ideas over and over again.

I didn't feel comfortable while reading this book, I was like seeing the war with my own eyes. the ideas were so unorganized maybe because they were written by a tired mind.

This book is very deep and sad and It gives a very honest image of the war...

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Feb 26, 2013 Viccy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: lariat-noms, 2013-lariat-books, top-books-2013, final-draft-of-lariat-titles

This short elegiac book will break your heart with its power. The author is an Iraqi War veteran currently the Michener Fellow in Poetry at the University of Texas. The reader will be entranced by the beautiful language and insight into the horrors of war. Private Bartle and Private Murphy are both fighting in Al Tafar, Iraq, and they do all they can to protect each other and survive. Reality turns into a hazy nightmare and the real world fades away as death and killing surmounts everything. The...more

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Dec 02, 2012 Scott rated it 5 of 5 stars

What a fantastic novel, Yellow Birds, the story of a young America soldier in Iraq, before, during, and after his tour, written by Kevin Powers who, as it happens, enlisted at 17, became a machine gunner in the desert, and spent a lot of time in city of Al Tafar, where much of Yellow Birds takes place. This book is lean and explosive, beautifully written and absolutely horrifying, so intelligent and open and brave about exploring what war feels like, what it does to people, to everyone and every...more What a fantastic novel, Yellow Birds, the story of a young America soldier in Iraq, before, during, and after his tour, written by Kevin Powers who, as it happens, enlisted at 17, became a machine gunner in the desert, and spent a lot of time in city of Al Tafar, where much of Yellow Birds takes place. This book is lean and explosive, beautifully written and absolutely horrifying, so intelligent and open and brave about exploring what war feels like, what it does to people, to everyone and everything it touches, which is to say it fucks it all up in the worst way, beyond imaging, both in the moment and forever afterwards. The story is told by Private Bartle, a poor kid (aren't they all these days... would we even be in Iraq if there was still a draft, and the rich old men who started the war to make even more money had to send the sons and daughters of their rich old friends to their death?) from Virginia who befriends an even younger kid, Private Murphy, in bootcamp. When they get to Iraq, lots of bad things happen, physically and psychologically, including the core "mystery" of tale, the exact fate of Murphy. Powers jumps around chronologically, but it's not some gimmick or whatever; it heightens the tension, and deepens our understanding. But the plot itself is almost secondary to the got-to-be-real details Powers piles on--men staying awake on guard duty by dropping Tabasco in their eyes; the thoughts that go through your mind during a mortar attack, mostly "get as small as you can"--as well as the powerful images and truths he schools us with. To take just one example, a soldier, when an embedded journalist asks the inevitable "What is battle like?" question, replies with (I'm paraphrasing), "It's like, have you ever been in a car accident? That split second when you know you're about to crash, and there's nothing you can do about it, and you know everything's about to suck and hurt and maybe even worse? That feeling, but for hours, and days, non-stop." There's a lot of things like that... and when Bartle gets home, those scenes? Maybe even more disturbing than anything we witness in Al Tafar. Fantastic novel. (less)

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May 22, 2013 Kirsten rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was pretty good... although 10% of its pages (and cover space) was taken up by sentences in speech marks telling me how it was going to change my bloody life, so it had a lot to live up to (and didn't). Interesting that there was a plot rather than simply description of what had happened in Al Tafar... the best part for me was actually the description in the whorehouse in Germany, it seemed horribly vivid and overlit and intense. Powers has good powers of description but relies quite unsubt...more

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Apr 24, 2013 Jt Lewis rated it 1 of 5 stars

In a meandering, cliché filled story exploring nearly every war-novel stereotype since the genre came into existence, Kevin Powers makes a dramatic – if fractured – case against the war in which he fought (and, ambitiously, war in general). He attempts to comment on the war itself, the psychological effects of the war, and the way in which it is run. His storytelling is hampered, however, by incessant use of overly dramatic language and shockingly hackneyed prose. His argument, which falls alon...more
In a meandering, cliché filled story exploring nearly every war-novel stereotype since the genre came into existence, Kevin Powers makes a dramatic – if fractured – case against the war in which he fought (and, ambitiously, war in general). He attempts to comment on the war itself, the psychological effects of the war, and the way in which it is run. His storytelling is hampered, however, by incessant use of overly dramatic language and shockingly hackneyed prose. His argument, which falls along nearly the same lines as those made by the authors of “The Red Badge of Courage” (from which he borrows the themes of courage, masculinity, and fear on the frontline), “Through the Wheat” (from which he borrows his fractured narrative and imprecise dialogue, as well as a melodramatic and quickly developed acclimatization to death), “The Marines of Autumn” (from which he borrows the flashback format and a Quentin Tarantino-esque timeline), and “The Things They Carried” (from which he borrows the style of stringing together stories at random that are only tangentially related to each other as well as a bizarre commentary on reality, truth, and perception in combat), attempts to characterize war as a fruitless endeavor that robs men of their manhood, innocence, and futures and devastates the land and people around which it is fought.

Powers quickly inserts into his storyline the typical authority figure both loved (for his skill in combat and effective, if rough, style of leadership – a la “Through the Wheat”) and hated (for his abrasive personality and somewhat odd superstitious or irrational behavior – a la “The Things They Carried”). Just as blithely and without ceremony, he begins to insert – from page one – unsupported potshots at the war nominally disguised as poetically abrupt observations. “The war had killed thousands by September.” “The war tried to kill us in the spring.” Just as abruptly, and with a generous amount of pseudo-intellectual or psychological foreshadowing and discussion, Powers kills off the company’s interpreter; not-so-subtly juxtaposing the Iraqi’s death with a flowery and pompously idyllic speech about his mother’s flower gardens, delivered just before he’s shot – covering his American colleagues with his own blood. Fourteen pages into the novel, Powers has exhausted the traditional amount of commentary on emotional decrepitness and war-horror typically allotted to a single narrative.

This does not prevent him, however, from gamely charging on, in the same style, for an additional two-hundred and twelve pages. Apparently satisfied with his portrayal of the war itself (i.e. the battlefield experience thereof), Powers begins to clumsily set the stage for the central conflict of the novel – the mysterious events surrounding the inevitable death of the protagonist’s (Bartle’s) best friend, a trope well-employed by every other mediocre war novelist in recent history. In a vain attempt to engender empathy and fear in the heart of the reader, Powers describes at length the promise that Bartle rashly makes his friend’s (Murph’s) mother – the substance, motives, and result of which the reader could most likely have guessed within the first four pages of the novel – and the apparently endless and circular internal dialogue in which the incredibly pessimistic and prematurely depressed main character indulges. He utilizes this storyline well past its inherent usefulness as a means of criticizing the divisive and emotionally attritious nature of war in general.

Alternating between chapters set in Nineveh, Iraq in 2004 (pregnant to bursting with monolithically repetitive internal dialogue on the nature of manhood, the meaning of life, and the weather) and Richmond, Virginia in 2005 (chapters characterized by all-too-familiar and stereotypical descriptions of the painful adjustment veterans must make in order to acclimate themselves to civilian life; a transition which, of course, Bartle (weighed down by the dramatic and mysterious guilt that haunts him) is unable to make), Powers attempts to illustrate the effects the war has had on the tender mind of a once eighteen-year-old angsty boy, now a 21 year old angsty man. War takes the life from the men who fight it, even if they survive – a theme liberally explored by writers since the Greco-Roman era. Fighting through nausea at the typicality and repetitively over-poetic prose which Powers is all too willing to spew at the sight of a sunset, death, or an untied shoe, the reader understands that the author is attempting to describe a myriad of negative effects that war has on the psyche and body of the soldiers it claims.

Somehow managing to bring a story characterized by a suspiciously endless quality simultaneously to an abrupt end, Kevin Powers – a poet who became an author in what might conservatively be described as the worst decision of his life – dramatically completes his case: war has desensitized Bartle, and he has committed crimes in the name of the country he sought to serve (or, more accurately, to escape). War has taken his patriotism, his connection with his friends and family, his best friend and concurrently his honor, and, now, his future. The final chapter, set as Bartle sits in prison for covering up the death of his best friend, does absolutely nothing to add substance to Powers’s argument, but does succeed in exceeding even his own high standards for hyperbolic and caricaturishly typical storytelling.

Both Bartle and his best friend (who finds himself walking naked through the streets in a style suspiciously similar to that of “Catch 22”’s main character) eventually lose their minds – and, finally, both have died, though only one is buried. War has claimed two more victims, and the reader can let an audible sigh of relief at the close of the story escape lips hitherto screwed up in disgust at the style, storytelling, and themes of Kevin Powers’s “novel”.
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Mar 31, 2013 Wendell rated it 3 of 5 stars

To be unable to praise this book wholeheartedly is a disappointment. Powers’ novel depicts a vast, unhealed sadness, and only the most callous reader could fail to experience the weight of that. But it is not a great book; often, in fact, it’s not even good writing. To be sure, The Yellow Birds sets out to describe emotional trauma and the burden of conscience, but its oneiric qualities often generate more incoherence than empathy. Powers’ protagonist, Bartle, in fact, is not necessarily “passin...more To be unable to praise this book wholeheartedly is a disappointment. Powers’ novel depicts a vast, unhealed sadness, and only the most callous reader could fail to experience the weight of that. But it is not a great book; often, in fact, it’s not even good writing. To be sure, The Yellow Birds sets out to describe emotional trauma and the burden of conscience, but its oneiric qualities often generate more incoherence than empathy. Powers’ protagonist, Bartle, in fact, is not necessarily “passing through the fields of memory,” as jacket copy would have it. At times, he is simply raving. And not just raving – raving in purple prose, the most self-indulgent passages of which would have benefited from a reduction in adjectives by about a third and in similes and metaphors by well more than half.

In that sense, The Yellow Birds feels like student writing—assuming a student writer with stupendous material and a voracious but untrustworthy eye for detail. Here are two specific examples of the failure both of Power’s imagination and of Powers’ editors; sidereally, both are descriptions of the appearance of the sky. In one, the light at dawn is “the color of unripe oranges”; in the other, 50 pages later, the sky is “the color of unworked iron.” Well, what is the color of unripe oranges? They are lime-green. Does Powers really mean that the morning sky was lime-green? And what is the color of unworked iron? What, for that matter, is the color of worked iron? Lapses like these are self-conscious, get in the way of the reading, and they pull the reader out of the narrative. There are far too many of them.

But what makes The Yellow Birds most unsatisfying are, first, its slavish aping of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, particularly in the opening chapters where the voice is identical to O’Brien’s; and, second, a major plot point that rings false. (**Spoilers follow.**)

Powers asks us to believe that Bartle’s decision to float the mutilated body of his friend, Murph, away down the river rather than allow the corpse to be transported home is motivated by fear that Murph’s mother might open the coffin and see the extent of her son’s injuries. Bartle wants to spare her both that sight and the true story of Murph’s horrific death. After Murph is dead, Bartle even writes the boy’s mother a letter, pretending to be her son. This might be an intriguing dilemma (though its value as a moral quandary is significantly reduced by the fact that, in order to maintain the secret, Bartle and his companions murder an innocent civilian). But if the coffin were closed, and Murph’s mother had been told, as she surely would have been, to leave it that way, why would she have looked inside? Do people do that? How would she even have had access to the coffin?

The reader, however, must believe this was a real possibility—or at least that Bartle believed it to be. Otherwise, his actions are not (arguably) kind, they are merely vile. What ensues, predictably, is that Murph’s mother is unsatisfied by the lack of a corpse and by the conflicting explanations for her son’s death. She presses for an investigation, and the military, in due time, produces scapegoats but no actual information. Powers never makes it clear whether she does or does not learn from Bartle’s lips the entire story (beginning with the fact that her son’s death was a sort of assisted suicide) and that, too, is vaguely unsatisfying. Bartle acknowledges that he had no right to make choices for Murph’s mother (which any reader with a conscience had long ago worked out for himself), but does he hold to the lie or doesn’t he? The arc of the novel almost seems to demand that Powers not leave the answer vague.

Nonetheless, it is in the book’s last chapter that Powers hits his narrative stride, and the scene of a meeting between Murph’s mother and Bartle becomes a powerful discourse on the differences between forgiveness and living with what Bartle calls “a justified resignation.” If there is not precisely a sense of earned wisdom in the scene, there is the resounding ring of truth. Would that this compelling and beautiful sound had encompassed the entire book.
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Mar 30, 2013 Mary rated it 5 of 5 stars

Kevin Powers has done extraordinary interior work and the interior monologue of the mind and heart are not linear. He recreates his main character Bartle's struggles with the reality of war, with the sensitivity of being human when faced with evil and inhumanity and with the reality of his life in the face of what he's seen and done. The writing is elegiacally beautiful on a subject that is anything but. The achievement here is breathtaking.

For those who read this book, and yes, I have read many...more

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Mar 27, 2013 Stephen rated it 4 of 5 stars

The ten-year anniversary of the War in Iraq just passed, a good time to look back by reading Kevin Powers' "The Yellow Birds," which some critics have called the best novel yet on that conflict. "The Yellow Birds" is, to be sure, a powerful and masterfully written account of war trauma, of young men who simply do not have the psychological resources to do battle in Iraq's frightening cultural and geographical landscape. We are not here in the claustrophic jungles of Vietnam but in the searing de...more

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Mar 23, 2013 Karen McMillan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

This is a poetic, beautiful and powerful novel that highlights the brutality of war and its terrible impact afterwards. Written by an Iraq war veteran, the author has drawn on his own experiences to create a novel that is profoundly insightful. John is haunted by Murph, a fellow soldier, who didn’t make it back from the war. They bonded through basic training when twenty one-year-old John was instructed to look after eighteen-year-old Murph. They both joined the army because they longed for some...more

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Mar 20, 2013 Judith rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a fictional account of an American veteran who has difficulty (to put it mildly) returning to life at home after serving in the war in Iraq, and it was chosen by NYT as one of their 10 notable books in 2012. As I was reading it, I kept thinking of the reported statistics that an average of 22 America vets commit suicide every day. At first I thought it was a gross exaggeration, but I kept checking news sources and they all have the same story. That fact is mind-boggling and horrific. It'...more

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Mar 11, 2013 Claire rated it 3 of 5 stars

I would not go so far as to say that I enjoyed this book, as such. It was a tough read. Kevin Powers studied poetry at University and then went off to war in Iraq. He came back and wrote this debut novel.

The novel is beautifully written. I feel certain that this must be the most poetic war novel ever written. The story centres around two young men who are at war in Iraq. Powers perfectly describes the tightrope between tedium and stress that soldiers are forced to walk. It is not a spoiler to sa...more I would not go so far as to say that I enjoyed this book, as such. It was a tough read. Kevin Powers studied poetry at University and then went off to war in Iraq. He came back and wrote this debut novel.

The novel is beautifully written. I feel certain that this must be the most poetic war novel ever written. The story centres around two young men who are at war in Iraq. Powers perfectly describes the tightrope between tedium and stress that soldiers are forced to walk. It is not a spoiler to say that one of the young men dies, we are told that early on.

The novel's chapters alternate between Iraq, and the US, after the narrator has returned home and is dealing with his feelings about war and his comrade's death. It is a tense novel but this clear split between war and home helps diffuse the tension a little, but also lets the novel build as we find out how the boy dies. The novel had to be split in this way, otherwise we would have got to the finale too early.

The story of John, our narrator is timeless. The intense stress of war has ravaged his young body and exhausted his mind. He witnesses horrors that I cannot even begin to imagine. Then he gets home and feels like he has no connection to his old friends and acquaintances, and no real purpose. It made me wonder what Powers' experience of war was. Did he come back from war and feel like he had no purpose? Or was he writing this book in his head while he was trying not to fall asleep on a long stint of guard duty?

I cannot say that I was sorry when the book was over but I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in appreciating what war is like. I do not even think it has to be the recent Arab wars. These emotions and feelings as a result of war could just aswell apply to soldiers returning from the second world war, almost every grandparent of the people of my generation in Europe. And they probably came back to deal with this mental trauma, and raised our parents, who raised us. Albeit on a much smaller scale, now we are doing it all over again.

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Feb 23, 2013 Casey Hampton rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: war-fiction

I was a little leery in the beginning but by the time I was finished it didn't disappoint. I'll admit to just reading this in one go. That being said, the material is pretty heavy and in retrospect, taking one's time with this might be the best path. The only reason I'm not giving this five stars is that it just took too long to hook me but five or four stars regardless, this is an intense book that is well written, especially when you find out its the author's first book.

The following moments i...more

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Feb 19, 2013 Terry rated it 3 of 5 stars

Kevin Powers, we learn from the blurb about the author at the back of the book, is a poet, which does not come as a surprise after reading this beautifully--poetically--written book. The prose is amazingly evocative, elegant, never florid. And it's set in the war in Iraq. Sights, smells, sounds are all vividly described. There's not much of a plot or narrative; not much happens. But it's about how the war destroys young men told through the relationship of two young men (and their sergeant) whil...more

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Feb 18, 2013 Andrea rated it 3 of 5 stars

I read the yellow birds thinking it was going to be a heart wrenching detail of army life in Quwait. I was but not what I was expecting. This book was the most sad, vivid, detail-orienatated page turner I just couldn't put down. The extreme anxiety these soilders really face on a day to day basis is what no one should ever have to feel. feeling?? there is no feeling left in these soliders and they are dying to find it. They want to be led back to normalacy but they just accepted the fact that th...more

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Feb 08, 2013 Debbie added it

DID NOT FINISH

I started to read this acclaimed novel about a friendship, set during the war in Iraq, among other reasons because I wanted to try the Literature & War Read-Along, hosted by Beauty is a Sleeping Cat.

This year, I’ve determined that I’m censoring my reading more closely than I did in 2012. In particular, one big trigger for the red flags to go up is that four letter word that starts with f that used to be so shocking. Thing is, I want it still be to be shocking and I’m tired of i...more

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topics	posts	views	last activity
Spoiler Alert - So what really happened?	17	176	Mar 18, 2013 06:14pm
21st Century Lite...: Yellow Birds: The whole book (general discussion)	3	34	Feb 27, 2013 06:33am
21st Century Lite...: Yellow Birds Chapter 8	5	14	Feb 14, 2013 10:20am
21st Century Lite...: Yellow Birds Chapter Four	7	17	Feb 12, 2013 09:32pm
21st Century Lite...: Yellow Birds, Chapters 2 & 3	13	21	Feb 12, 2013 07:34am
21st Century Lite...: Yellow Birds, Chapter Nine	6	16	Feb 09, 2013 11:02am

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