The colonel cleared his throat and pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket and rested them on the bridge of his nose. This story was hard to read but it felt important, helped along by the stunning prose and some truly unforgettable passages that literally made me stop dead in my tracks to absorb and reflect the weight of the words written. I read this opening paragraph and then as I tend to do I read it out loud to my wife as she was making (I wrote fixing first, but then realized that was a nonsensical Kansas word. When we lived in the Philippines, there was a collision at an intersection where we were waiting at a four-way stop.

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. This one is well written and caused me to think about how people deal with the ultimate tragedy of war when they meet it face to face. When most people hear the word "casino," they think of slot machines trilling and the tinny crashing of coins.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. Listing in concert with our deliberate footsteps, the gentle curves of her body swayed beneath her torn clothes. The Yellow Birds is identified by the author as a novel so he alone knows what bears some resemblance to his own experience as a soldier in Iraq.

War had made him unfit for the company of women or children, incapable of dealing with subtlety, complexity or bureaucracy. Thus Marge Gunderson, the sheriff in the film Fargo, asking an unrepentant killer why so many people are dead at his hands.But there is a deeper significance to gambling, especially as it pertains to casinos located on federal Indian reservations. stars all around and I'm looking forward to reading all future books by Powers, a combat veteran of the Iraq war.

There is no examination of the war itself, as the focus is all on Bartle and Murph's relationship: when Powers touches on the psychological aftermath of war, it's only with reference to what happened to Murph, with barely an acknowledgement of all the other killing Bartle has done. In queste pagine la follia della guerra ha andamento per nulla nervoso, più da trip di oppio che di anfetamina. The other quibble I have is that any Iraqi point of view whatever is very much missing from Power's account. The consequences of that promise, along with the fear, isolation, and craziness of war, are what make up the story. Admirers of David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon will be drawn to this complex crime story with similar themes and settings.This sense of powerlessness is echoed in other war novels like Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. At the very least, The Yellow Birds is interesting because it is on the vanguard of our literary grappling with the war. Three years later, when Lissa learned that a young white oil worker, Kristopher "KC" Clarke, had disappeared from his reservation worksite, she became particularly concerned.

A glorious example (which should go on James Woods’ ‘writing about photographs’ blacklist) is the beginning of a description of a Polaroid of Murph and his girlfriend. The Yellow Birds is breathtaking good, profoundly insightful and written with an incredible amount of emotional precision. The gradually unfolding circumstances of Murphy’s death – along with the attendant consequences for Bartle and Sterling – serve as the novel’s animating mystery.The Yellow Birds ends with a note of muted hope, and I also hope for Mr Powers, that he and his brothers and sisters find healing in the arts and literature. However, I think the main factor is this: to date, I have read no finer depictions of the war experience than those found in the works Tim O'Brien. My only complaint was that the poetic framework of the book was sometimes exposed, as in the multiple, rapid fire use of the word "and" to try to push the narrative down into a stream of consciousness channel. 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.