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Summary
Summary
"The Iliad of the Iraq war" (Tim Weiner)--a gut-wrenching, beautiful memoir of the consequences of war on the psyche of a young man.
Eat the Apple is a daring, twisted, and darkly hilarious story of American youth and masculinity in an age of continuous war. Matt Young joined the Marine Corps at age eighteen after a drunken night culminating in wrapping his car around a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases charged with making him a Marine. Young survived the training and then not one, not two, but three deployments to Iraq, where the testosterone, danger, and stakes for him and his fellow grunts were dialed up a dozen decibels.
With its kaleidoscopic array of literary forms, from interior dialogues to infographics to prose passages that read like poetry, Young's narrative powerfully mirrors the multifaceted nature of his experience. Visceral, ironic, self-lacerating, and ultimately redemptive, Young's story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the absurdism of twenty-first-century war, the manned-up vulnerability of those on the front lines, and the true, if often misguided, motivations that drive a young man to a life at war.
Searing in its honesty, tender in its vulnerability, and brilliantly written, Eat the Apple is a modern war classic in the making and a powerful coming-of-age story that maps the insane geography of our times.
Author Notes
Matt Young holds an MA in Creative Writing from Miami University and is the recipient of fellowships with Words After War and the Carey Institute for Global Good. His work can be found in Tin House , Word Riot , the Rumpus , and elsewhere. He is a combat veteran, and lives in Olympia, Washington, where he teaches writing.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this bold memoir, ex-Marine Young examines how war transformed him from a confused teenager into a dangerous and damaged man. Fresh from high school and with no direction, Young walked into a Marine recruitment center in 2005 and sealed his fate. Soon he was suffering the indignities of basic training before being deployed to "the sandbox" in Iraq, where he sweated, masturbated, shot stray dogs, and watched friends get blown up. Despite the constant misery and suffocating discipline, Young reenlisted twice more and even volunteered for Iraq on his last tour. Brief stints in the U.S. that blurred away into drunken violence and infidelity made war seem far safer to Young than civilian life. Eschewing first-person memoir conventions, Young, now a creative-writing professor at Centralia College, presents his experiences through a broad range of narrative approaches-second person, third person, first-person plural, screenplay, crude drawings, invented dialogue between various selves, etc. There's real risk of trivializing the material, but Young matches his stylistic daring with raw honesty, humor, and pathos. Comparisons to Michael Herr's Dispatches, about the Vietnam War, are apt, but where Herr searched for thrills and headlines as a journalist, Young writes from a grunt's perspective that has changed little since Roman legionnaires yawned through night watch on Hadrian's Wall: endless tedium interrupted by moments of terror and hilarity, all under a strict regime of blind obedience and foolish machismo. (Feb. 2018) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* If Young enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 2005 out of a post-high-school lack of direction or general brokenness, the next half decade and its accompanying three tours of Iraq would take him further from any certainty and crush him into more and smaller pieces still. His memoir is creatively told in atmospheric and gut-checking essays, some of which include lists, quizzes, or the author's stick-figure drawings. As often as he is I, the author also addresses himself as you, past-me, the boy, this recruit, or we, the collective voice of his fleet. Young sobs in bathrooms; learns to shoot a gun; drinks too much; smokes countless cigarettes; masturbates to pass the time; cheats on his fiancée; loses friends; doesn't die; doesn't kill anyone else; doesn't know what to talk about with civilians. He gets hurt and now knows the places beyond his body where that hurt will live forever. Readers will wonder how people are expected to fight wars at all let alone survive them. Young's visceral prose, honed in college and writing programs after his tours of duty, confronts shame, guilt, and pain without flinching yet is beyond sympathetic to its subject; it is another act of service.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Young, a fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and creative writing professor at Centralia College, WA, tells of being a U.S. marine and serving three tours in Iraq in the mid-to-late 2000s. He does not sugarcoat the details of war or ask for forgiveness; in fact, he is not sure that he wants readers to thank him for his service. Each chapter is brief, three to four pages, and presented in varying formats, such as a screenplay and thoughts in first, second, and third person. Some chapters are written to the author's past self from his future self and one section is an apology letter to a cabbie he punched after his third tour. The difficulty of basic training is contrasted with the boredom and brutality of combat. Young's actions-cheating on his fiancé, surviving an IED explosion, holding a severed head-may cause revulsion among readers or may lead to sympathy. VERDICT This honest war memoir will shock and horrify, will cause readers to tear up, and will make them wish they could tell a 19-year-old marine that everything will be okay. Highly recommended for all collections.-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.