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. Matt 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 21st-century war, the manned-up vulnerability of those on
the front lines, and the true, if often misguided, motivations that
drove 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.
