Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

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Some might compare it to other war-themed books: The Naked and the Dead, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Things They Carried, or even A Separate Peace. They would, in my opinion, be misguided. 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. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire."

CRANE MURDOCH: Agreed. And yet at the same time she has lived this life where she has had many experiences that a lot of people, particularly women from her community, have had as well. I found her story to be both representative and non-representive at all at the same time. But mostly I think what initially I saw in my conversations with her in the time I spent with her in the very beginning, as she was trying to find out what happened to this young oil worker KC Clarke, and as I was beginning to follow along with her and her journey, I realized that the way that she saw the oil boom was far more interesting than the way that I could see the oil boom. The fragmented, non-linear structure and sometimes broken, redundant syntax are clearly meant to reflect a narrator whose sense of self has been shattered and, in sifting through the pieces, he is exploring his culpability and who he is meant to be after the war is over. There are some poetic lines and descriptions that are emotionally piercing in their perfection. MARTIN: Can you talk to me about the “why?” You ask this question in the book: why is Lissa so driven to find these lost people that don’t have anything to do with her? Listening to the Veterans and reading their stories, I find myself pondering Achilles. He might have returned to his native Greece, his father's house and mother's homeland; but he preferred a hero's death in battle. The greatest warrior in all literature, the ultimate soldier could never be a civilian again. War had made him unfit for the company of women or children, incapable of dealing with subtlety, complexity or bureaucracy. What did he care if the living room walls were painted beige or blue after he had painted streets in blood? Could he ever tolerate the company of disagreeable persons when he had dismembered better men whom he frankly admired? 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. There are not happy moments in this book for it is about war, man’s greatest inhumanity to man. The scene alternates between Richmond, Virginia and Al Tafar, Nineveh Province, Iraq. Private Bartle carries the war inside himself wherever he is.

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C’è anche tanta compassione: peccato che l’oggetto di tale sentimento non siano mai i presunti nemici, gli haji, le prime vittime di quest’altra guerra del cazzo. I've put off writing this review for a few days now while I mulled the book over because something in it just didn't work for me. And this, indeed, is a conundrum, because this novel should have been tailor-made for me. Generally speaking, I'm a fan of contemporary war novels. I don't enjoy them as escapist entertainment; I take them seriously and I respect them because I want to learn, I want to listen, I want to know what it's like to go to war without actually having to go to war. In some ways, I see it as a duty. If we're going to ask young men and women to fight and die for our country, to risk physical and emotional maiming, we sure as hell need to know precisely what it is we ask of them and honor their service by asking them only to fight when absolutely necessary. Sadly, this hasn't always been our country's policy. Powers was 17 when he joined the army and what I'd really like to have read is his diary from that time or some other such personal account of his tour of duty. Soldiers managed to blog from Iraq in the early years and that first hand reporting was amazing. It wasn't trying to be literature, it was just about telling it as it happened. The boy goes to war, takes his place with his mates with pride and eagerness, looks with awe at those who have gone through this several times, and thinks to himself, this is it, this is what will change my life and make me a MAN! Change it does, for every experience in life changes you – for better or for worse, depends on the experience itself, but you change nevertheless! Becoming a MAN is so important for some that they go to extremes such as this boy, without truly understanding the meaning of what it means to go to war. And by the time they realise it, it’s just too late and perhaps the change so irrevocable that you can just hope and pray that they survive! I want to start out by being honest with you. I am conflicted about this one. This is a story about the Iraq war. It was a finalist for the National Book Awards, and one of the New York Times 10 best books of 2012. It also won the PEN/Hemingway award.

I used to have a Marine recruiter that lived across the street from me. I mentioned to him how devastating it was to see the names of these kids that were sitting in high school classrooms just months before they died overseas. He replied to me that they had realized the political ramifications of that and now were holding up deploying Marines to combat zones until they turned 19. He could have just been bullshitting me (He was a spin doctor patrolling the mall daily looking for kids with nothing to do.), as if 19 was so much better than 18, but I did notice that average ages of the deceased soldiers did spring up especially after Bush called up and deployed all those reservists. I was left largely as unenlightened about Fort Berthold at the end as I was at the beginning. That said Yellow Bird isn’t an 'everything' book. Nor should it be. Its strength derives not from vast panoramas but from an intimate gaze. By looking at Clarke’s murder through Yellow Bird’s eyes, we get to see the forces that shape and ultimately unite their lives. CRANE MURDOCH: She has no shame. I think so many things. I think that the time I’ve spent with Lissa has really made clear to me what’s important in the world. I was drawn to her initially because I felt this deep level of empathy from her, and this ability that she has to really connect on an intimate level with almost any person, probably any person. And I found that connectivity to be almost intoxicating to be around, when you’re with someone who is that willing to tell the truth.She’s a very complicated person, but also just unbelievably loving. Bartle is our narrator in first person POV, highly effective for this novel, for we are placed in the mishmash of all his feelings about what is happening and what has happened, as well as in the middle of his experiences in Al Tafar, Iraq. Chapters alternate mostly between Iraq in 2004 and being home in Richmond, Virginia in 2005, showing the conditions of the war, and then, how things are for the narrator after the war. In the base gymnasium at Fort Dix, New Jersey, there is a get together with family right before deployment. Bartles mother says, “I told you not to do this, John,” then says, “I’m sorry. Let’s have a nice time.” After she’s left, Murphy’s mother, LaDonna approaches Bartles and charges him with looking after Murphy. Bartles promises he will. For this Sgt. Sterling punches him out after family members have left, saying “You shouldn’t have done that, Private.”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.” There were so many similarities that, every time I found one, I couldn't help but think, "Tim O'Brien does that better." And O'Brien allows us to emotionally connect with his characters in a way that Powers never quite achieved for me. I felt sympathy, but not empathy. Guardian First Book award 2012 shortlist announced | Books | The Guardian". theguardian.com . Retrieved 2014-06-28.

Still, Dad felt the after-effects of combat. When we lived in the Philippines, there was a collision at an intersection where we were waiting at a four-way stop. Dad, more scared than I've ever seen him before or since, opened the car door and hid under the steering column. Even at that young age, I knew that this wasn't normal. Sierra Crane Murdoch has written a deft, compelling account of an oil field murder and the remarkable woman who made it her business to solve it.I can’t stop thinking and talking about this book.” —Rachel Monroe, author of Savage Appetites This is not the quintessential book about the Iraqi War, even though the settings are mainly the battlefield of Iraq and “home”, in this case, Richmond, Virginia. Rather, it is a book about all wars and all situations that force us to live with becoming less than human. I need to be a man and what better way to become one than to go fight for my country,” said the boy in a tone that brooked no argument.The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. 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.

The suffering the Iraqi War veterans endure in this book will touch a raw spot in you that you might prefer not to experience.A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity. With regard to the autobiographical elements of the novel, Powers says: "The core of what Bartle goes through, I empathised with it. I felt those things, and asked the same questions: is there anything about this that's redeeming; does asking in itself have value? The story is invented, but there's a definite alignment between his emotional and mental life and mine." [6] Plot [ edit ] To be generous, perhaps the idea of a solider-poet in the Iraq war is still too incongruous for me – perhaps I’m expecting that ‘grunt’ perspective (‘grunt’ being the term Jarhead uses) and a stronger hold on the ‘feeling’ of war.