![]() ![]() ![]() The book has been compared to All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, The Red Badge of Courage, The Naked and the Dead, The Things They Carried: practically every classic war novel in the American canon, along with Cormac McCarthy and, for good measure, the Iliad. At any rate, the reaction to The Yellow Birds – the first novel by Kevin Powers, who enlisted at 17 in the US army and served in Iraq in 2004-5 – has been fairly hysterical. If Dr Johnson was right that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, then imagine the havoc the idea plays with book reviewing types, who spend whole days on the sofa and call it work. The book world has a tendency to go weak at the knees where men of action, and particularly soldiers, are concerned. ![]()
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