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mbgianni's review against another edition
4.0
Powerful and interesting to hear a first-person perspective. We ask a lot of our armed forces. I listened to the audible version, which was narrated by the author. He was incredibly stoic through some truly terrible things, and then his voice cracked only once when speaking about his son, at which point I immediately burst into tears.
lizzer's review against another edition
4.0
Recommended to me by a guy who knows the guy. So far very good. Honest and gritty.
jobustitch's review against another edition
5.0
Listened to the audiobook and it was amazing. A must read.
jen286's review against another edition
2.0
I was hoping for a more riveting story. I just felt like it was just i am crazy. Did I mention crazy? Crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy. Okay, but I don't really know what that means. The crazy is there whenI wake up. Okay, but what does that mean? I don't know. I was just wxpecting a little more and a little more about what it was like after coming home, but not just keep telling me the crazy is always here...
helpfulsnowman's review against another edition
4.0
Excerpt:
When I deployed for the first time [my wife] asked her grandmother for advice. Her grandfather served in Africa and Europe in World War II. Her grandmother would know what to do.
"How do I live with him being gone? How do I help him when he comes home?" my wife asked.
"He won't come home," her grandmother answered. "The war will kill him one way or the other. I hope for you that he dies while he is there. Otherwise the war will kill him at home. With you."
The story of Brian Castner's Crazy is trim, sad, and a must-read.
What makes this book so different from the other books about the Iraq war?
1. There are no real politics. You can certainly superimpose your own politics on it if you want, as is the case with goddamn EVERYTHING, but the book itself goes a different way. It's highly personal, focusing on the side of things that you don't see so much. The writer talks about what he knows and what he experienced, and he leaves the rest alone.
2. He does a good job making you understand his Crazy. A lot of books about people who are crazy try to make you experience crazy for yourself, see the world as they see it. So they use weird line breaks, broken sentences, bizarre wordplay and other tricks to try and take you somewhere you can't go because, well, you're not crazy. What Castner does is explain what he is thinking about when he's feeling crazy. How it changes him.
3. This is not, like so many other books about people with problems, about redemption. Yes, there is a brief moment when he seems to overcome his crazy, just for a second. But it comes back, of course. And the odds against him are insurmountable. After he describes panicking in an airport and mentally planning who to shoot first and where to go in order to escape, it's hard to imagine that he'll ever be all the way better. After he explains just a touch of the physics behind explosions and why they can destroy a brain without destroying the body around it, it's hard to think that he's ever going to be the way he was before. After he says that his wife wants him to cheat on her just so that she could leave him, you kind of give up on the idea of him having a normal life.
So, in a genre that involves a lot of dates, tactical information, and insider knowledge, someone has written a book that is deeply personal and brave in revealing that something inside someone who made a career out of being tough and mentally calm, that something inside that person has been fundamentally and irrevocably broken. More than that, it does a great job of connecting the past with the present and making a reader understand the problem: there's really IS no difference.
When I deployed for the first time [my wife] asked her grandmother for advice. Her grandfather served in Africa and Europe in World War II. Her grandmother would know what to do.
"How do I live with him being gone? How do I help him when he comes home?" my wife asked.
"He won't come home," her grandmother answered. "The war will kill him one way or the other. I hope for you that he dies while he is there. Otherwise the war will kill him at home. With you."
The story of Brian Castner's Crazy is trim, sad, and a must-read.
What makes this book so different from the other books about the Iraq war?
1. There are no real politics. You can certainly superimpose your own politics on it if you want, as is the case with goddamn EVERYTHING, but the book itself goes a different way. It's highly personal, focusing on the side of things that you don't see so much. The writer talks about what he knows and what he experienced, and he leaves the rest alone.
2. He does a good job making you understand his Crazy. A lot of books about people who are crazy try to make you experience crazy for yourself, see the world as they see it. So they use weird line breaks, broken sentences, bizarre wordplay and other tricks to try and take you somewhere you can't go because, well, you're not crazy. What Castner does is explain what he is thinking about when he's feeling crazy. How it changes him.
3. This is not, like so many other books about people with problems, about redemption. Yes, there is a brief moment when he seems to overcome his crazy, just for a second. But it comes back, of course. And the odds against him are insurmountable. After he describes panicking in an airport and mentally planning who to shoot first and where to go in order to escape, it's hard to imagine that he'll ever be all the way better. After he explains just a touch of the physics behind explosions and why they can destroy a brain without destroying the body around it, it's hard to think that he's ever going to be the way he was before. After he says that his wife wants him to cheat on her just so that she could leave him, you kind of give up on the idea of him having a normal life.
So, in a genre that involves a lot of dates, tactical information, and insider knowledge, someone has written a book that is deeply personal and brave in revealing that something inside someone who made a career out of being tough and mentally calm, that something inside that person has been fundamentally and irrevocably broken. More than that, it does a great job of connecting the past with the present and making a reader understand the problem: there's really IS no difference.
bookrec's review against another edition
4.0
This book was recommended in the Chicago Tribune just this Sunday. It tells the story of his life in Iraq & after he is home. You get a real feel for what these guys go thru. He was in the bomb squad so everyday he had a real good chance of not making it home. The book can be a little unsettling. He tells you right off the bat he is CRAZY. You get to see why.
bobbo49's review against another edition
3.0
I heard an interview with the author on NPR, and the book provides an insider's view of the war in Iraq by an explosives ordnance demolition expert - someone who is called in to blow up i.e.d.s, or to survey the site after one explodes. This is an incredibly intense and close-up look at the impact of war on the lives of the soldiers and civilians at its epicenter, including particularly the lingering effects of ptsd and traumatic brain injuries on the military and their families. Castner is a soldier, not a writer, but his book is thought-provoking and distressing.
brockboland's review
5.0
Heart-wrenching and surprisingly poetic. Reads more like a novel than a memoir.
mxinevitable's review against another edition
5.0
Great book on powering through war and is aftermath. Great if you want to know about EOD roles and great if you want to hear stories of PTSD in veterans.
balzat28's review
4.0
There are thousands upon thousands of war memoirs out there--a testament to the unending richness of history but also, paradoxically, the frequency and magnitude with which we as a country go to war. These memoirs--so rich and significant, so important--can only be written by those who survive the most horrific experiences imaginable, and thus our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live--our collective history as a species--is nourished on the sweat, blood, and nightmares of soldiers. For every Born on the Fourth of July, Jarhead, or With the Old Breed, there are millions of other stories that go unwritten, untold, unpublished, and forgotten. Not every soldier will live to tell their story of war, and not every survivor of war will tell their story while alive. These stories are perhaps the most important that can be told, and each is worth its weight in ink and paper, if not more so.
But where most of these memoirs are crucial parts of history, there are very few that can also be considered good literature--that is, something that does more than tell a story from Point A to Point B, or about Persons A through E and what they did at Events 1 through 10. There are those few soldiers who are gifted enough to channel their experiences through more than pure recollection--Brian Turner's poetry collection Here, Bullet and Tim O'Brien's novel-memoir The Things They Carried are the two examples that come immediately to mind--but when they do, it adds even more depth to an already profound story.
Brian Castner's The Long Walk is an example of that kind of book. An EOD technician, Castner moves between his experiences defusing IEDs during the Iraq War and struggling to re-acclimate to civilian life once his tour of duty has ended. Memories of he and his team approaching strange, dangerous contraptions in the sweltering Iraqi weather, their bodies weighed down by 80 pounds of gear while unseen forces shoot at them, move suddenly into Castner swimming through 12-packs of beer on the couch, going between the floors of the local VA hospital, and taking yoga classes in the hopes of ridding himself of the spider-like "Crazy" that has nested in his brain. He runs, he is tested by doctors, a bomb explodes, the yoga teacher twists herself in front of him, he steps in liquefied intestines, he takes his son to school, a phone rings in that emptiness of night, he dresses his son for hockey, he is insubordinate, he is diagnosed, he is sane, he is insane. It all moves together as one, as though his time in war and time in peace were melting together as one until he is a man in both worlds and neither world at the same time. His everyday life is filled with the chaos of war--he has an imaginary gun with him at all times, and his eyes scout for men who seem suspiciously familiar--while his memories are dominated by endless hours of waiting for IEDs to be reported, for his team to approach and defuse, of the camaraderie and sense of purpose he felt while the world around him fell away into thunder and fire.
This balance is what gives Castner's memoirs its literary depth and makes it a rarity among the countless other books to come out of the last decade of war. Were this book stripped of its cover and any biographical information on the author, you'd be tempted to think of it as a clever novel of sorts--a look at how, as Castner's grandmother-in-law tells his wife, war will kill the men it saves and send back someone new. There would be unfair comparisons to The Hurt Locker, some discussion of how expertly the novelist avoids one Hollywood-war-movie cliche after another--the nighttime scene in which a lowly pigeon brings forth a discussion about what the men will do when they return home is formulaic and saccharine, the critics would say in one voice--and a general sense that this writer, though promising, has watched Saving Private Ryan one too many times. But it's obviously real, still fresh and alive in Castner's mind--even his wife says his ability to remember even the most inconsequential of details is both amazing and frustrating--and it's a testament to Castner's skills as a writer that, more often than not, the reader questions what they're reading--the outlandishness, the carnage, the extremeness of all that's written down. After all, what better compliment to give a memoirist of war--and what darker condemnation to set upon the homeland reader--than to write about the world as it is and find resistence from those who find safety behind sanitized fantasies of how the world isn't. "This can't be real," the reader tells themselves, searching the cover for reassurance that this is just a novel, a story, a fabrication. "No one could survive this. This can't be happening now, not in my lifetime, to my friends and neighbors."
It is, and if the shelves of libraries and bookstores and archives are any proof, it will forever be.
This review was originally published at There Will Be Books Galore.
But where most of these memoirs are crucial parts of history, there are very few that can also be considered good literature--that is, something that does more than tell a story from Point A to Point B, or about Persons A through E and what they did at Events 1 through 10. There are those few soldiers who are gifted enough to channel their experiences through more than pure recollection--Brian Turner's poetry collection Here, Bullet and Tim O'Brien's novel-memoir The Things They Carried are the two examples that come immediately to mind--but when they do, it adds even more depth to an already profound story.
Brian Castner's The Long Walk is an example of that kind of book. An EOD technician, Castner moves between his experiences defusing IEDs during the Iraq War and struggling to re-acclimate to civilian life once his tour of duty has ended. Memories of he and his team approaching strange, dangerous contraptions in the sweltering Iraqi weather, their bodies weighed down by 80 pounds of gear while unseen forces shoot at them, move suddenly into Castner swimming through 12-packs of beer on the couch, going between the floors of the local VA hospital, and taking yoga classes in the hopes of ridding himself of the spider-like "Crazy" that has nested in his brain. He runs, he is tested by doctors, a bomb explodes, the yoga teacher twists herself in front of him, he steps in liquefied intestines, he takes his son to school, a phone rings in that emptiness of night, he dresses his son for hockey, he is insubordinate, he is diagnosed, he is sane, he is insane. It all moves together as one, as though his time in war and time in peace were melting together as one until he is a man in both worlds and neither world at the same time. His everyday life is filled with the chaos of war--he has an imaginary gun with him at all times, and his eyes scout for men who seem suspiciously familiar--while his memories are dominated by endless hours of waiting for IEDs to be reported, for his team to approach and defuse, of the camaraderie and sense of purpose he felt while the world around him fell away into thunder and fire.
This balance is what gives Castner's memoirs its literary depth and makes it a rarity among the countless other books to come out of the last decade of war. Were this book stripped of its cover and any biographical information on the author, you'd be tempted to think of it as a clever novel of sorts--a look at how, as Castner's grandmother-in-law tells his wife, war will kill the men it saves and send back someone new. There would be unfair comparisons to The Hurt Locker, some discussion of how expertly the novelist avoids one Hollywood-war-movie cliche after another--the nighttime scene in which a lowly pigeon brings forth a discussion about what the men will do when they return home is formulaic and saccharine, the critics would say in one voice--and a general sense that this writer, though promising, has watched Saving Private Ryan one too many times. But it's obviously real, still fresh and alive in Castner's mind--even his wife says his ability to remember even the most inconsequential of details is both amazing and frustrating--and it's a testament to Castner's skills as a writer that, more often than not, the reader questions what they're reading--the outlandishness, the carnage, the extremeness of all that's written down. After all, what better compliment to give a memoirist of war--and what darker condemnation to set upon the homeland reader--than to write about the world as it is and find resistence from those who find safety behind sanitized fantasies of how the world isn't. "This can't be real," the reader tells themselves, searching the cover for reassurance that this is just a novel, a story, a fabrication. "No one could survive this. This can't be happening now, not in my lifetime, to my friends and neighbors."
It is, and if the shelves of libraries and bookstores and archives are any proof, it will forever be.
This review was originally published at There Will Be Books Galore.