PositiveThe Washington Independent Review of BooksMatt Young’s Eat the Apple is an up-from-self-loathing memoir about his three deployments to Iraq between 2005 and 2009, which coincided with bumpy rites of passage in the desert … As coming of age starts to reside in Young’s mind, there is a parallel, platoon-wide upsurge in hesitant yet expressed intimacy that mutes the caustic corporals and supercilious sergeants, and domesticates the predictable loneliness and other atrocities yoked to war … Young’s saga is infused with trauma, toughing it out, and TLC. But, ironically, it is not a work that defines battle directly because Young never gets to kill. Apple is about the myriad psychological conflicts associated with concentrated exposure to combat.
David McCullough
PositiveThe Washington Independent Review of BooksThe author has remained a proud patriot, but now his ‘voice’ of reminiscence is tinged with circumspection. Americans have disassociated from their past, disengaged from history, downgraded cultural standards, and dumped the study of literary luminaries such as Flannery O’Connor, Willa Cather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Langston Hughes … The fixation with technological devices, a swerve from the humanities to ‘STEM’ (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), large numbers of unqualified or disinterested teachers, and financial curtailments in education have dusted up a matrix with a potentially dangerous destiny, says McCullough.
