Jon Krakauer’s latest book, Where Men Win Glory, is currently number 10 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and has been on the list for six weeks now. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend doing so. I have a review of the book up on The Faster Times website. The first two paragraphs of the piece are excerpted below.
Chinook helicopter over Afghanistan. Photo used with permission.
Jon Krakauer’s latest book, “Where Men Win Glory,” folds two epic stories into one volume: it is both a biography of Pat Tillman, the NFL-star turned soldier who was accidentally killed by his own platoon in Afghanistan in 2004, and a history of Afghanistan beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, charting the horrifying Soviet presence there, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the ongoing U.S. war. The Army tried to cover up Tillman’s death and the Bush administration tried to profit from it politically. It is a large, damning book that takes aim at those who would manipulate the truth.
While Tillman’s life is the thread that holds the book together and his story is expertly told, I was most fascinated by the broader context in which it is set. Especially gripping is Krakauer’s telling of the chain of events preceding the September 11 attacks. Take, for example, Krakauer’s description of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center: “The bomb had been assembled, delivered, and detonated by a Kuwati named Ramzi Yousef…Yousef had learned the art of making bombs from a manual written by the CIA for the mujahideen to use in their struggle against the Soviets.” While anyone who has seen “Charlie Wilson’s War” is familiar with the idea of blowback, it’s still devastating when such connections are made as clearly as they are here.
