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Geregistreerd op: 23 Nov 2016
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 Geplaatst: 13-02-2017 05:55:17
 Onderwerp: Zimmermans novel.
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A Rod Disappointed By All Star Omission - RealGM Wiretap
Alex Rodriguez was hoping to make the American League All-Star team JJ Hickson Nuggets Jersey , but he's content to have a few days off next week.
"I'm obviously disappointed," Rodriguez said. "It would have been fun to go out and represent the American League, that's for sure. But I know that while serving the suspension, the time off was very good for me. I hope the four days will be, too."
Rodriguez was hoping to make the squad as a reserve. Instead, Nelson Cruz won the fan voting as reserve designated hitter and Prince Fielder was voted on by the players, managers and coaches.
"I think the fans made a very wise choice and I think [Ned] Yost had a very difficult decision," Rodriguez said. "You can't go wrong with Prince. He's had a phenomenal year and he's also a big comeback story Gary Harris Nuggets Jersey , so I'm happy for Prince."
锘? On the opening page of The Sandbox, David Zimmermans gripping first novel about the Iraq war, Pvt. Toby Durrants convoy comes across a dead girl in the road, her body a small white mound, like a fallen bird. Tobys response is to put this child in the small cigar box I keep hidden in the back of my head, close its cardboard lid and snap a couple of rubber bands around it to keep it tightly shut. Just like Ive done with the rest.
In other words, Toby reacts to the war in the same way much of America does: he compartmentalizes it. He and his fellow soldiers do what they can to manage a relentless series of horrors that are better off concealed in locked boxes, the contents of each sharing a dark relationship to the others. The exact nature of that relationship Emmanuel Mudiay Nuggets Jersey , and the possible conspiracy it hints at, provides the drama that propels this book forward.
Consigned to one of Iraqs dustier corners as a bottom-rung grunt after being kicked out of Army Airborne training and flunking out of the Defense Language Institute, Toby is well versed in the self-deprecating sarcasm of those forced to pretend they dont care: The captain stares at me. I cant see his eyes behind the sunglasses, just two tiny Durrant heads reflected in the lenses. These Durrant heads look unhappy and tense.
Like many soldiers, Toby obsesses over the gap between the good life and the soul-sucking, latrine-dump-burning duties of low-ranking warriors. After his stateside girlfriend breaks up with him, he smokes a fine cigar he received from a sympathetic sergeant: The cigar is good. It tastes like a better life. One I might have had if my parents had taken a left instead of a right, if I had said no instead of yes Dikembe Mutombo Nuggets Jersey , if I had kept my eyes on the ball, if I had cleaned my plate, brushed my teeth and said my prayers. It tastes so good I can barely smoke it. The better life makes me choke a little.
For a character like this, in a war as full of indiscretion, deception and savage violence as Iraqs, there can really be only one destiny: the wrong end of a bad deal. But Zimmerman has more in mind than merely getting a hard-luck soldier into trouble. The Sandbox is loaded with an M.R.E. caseful of plot elements, all pulled from Iraq war headlines lost billions in cash, prisoner interrogations Danilo Gallinari Nuggets Jersey , soldier indiscretions, failed counterinsurgency plans and all play their part in bringing Tobys story to its terrible conclusion. That every question in this novel interrogates every other is one of its great strengths and will keep you turning the pages of its short chapters, as each weaves the insistent first-person mystery of Why me? with the larger mystery of What are we doing here?
The Sandbox is a strong debut even though Zimmermans prose tends toward the purple (often literally: a find-and-replace on purple would have improved many of the books landscapes). He can tug a little too hard at the heartstrings, as when he describes the scenery near a bombed-out toy factory: The road to the capital is still strewn with dusty pink rabbits and purple bears.
Still, by aiming too high, Zimmerman often hits the mark. Those burned toys, for instance, introduce an affecting story line about a young Iraqi child. Theres also an interrogation of an old Iraqi Allen Iverson Nuggets Jersey , Uncle Insurgent, that stuns even as it flirts with bathos. The prisoner, so frail there was hardly any hajji under the robe, makes declarations that sound like a jailhouse letter from Ulrike Meinhof: I have 10 guns and you call me bandit. You have million guns, so they call you soldier.
This should be ridiculous if anybodys going to get a line like that, it should be the tent-corner intellectual you find in every unit reading a dog-eared copy of Howard Zinn but Zimmermans willingness to risk melodrama is often matched by his ability to turn it into genuine feeling.
As The Sandbox comes to a close, Toby learns that wars final revelations are incomplete and that every bunker confession is in doubt. When an officer gives his version of the events that have engulfed Toby and his friends in an apocalypse of death and deceit, Toby says: I dont know whether to believe the captains entire story Alex English Nuggets Jersey , part or none. . . . It sounds too clever by half. Nothing that happens in this war adds up quite so neatly. I walk back and forth. . . . One, two, three, four, five. The numbers add up to the same sum every time. Nothing else in this place does. Its a fitting summary to the greater mystery and a reminder that the Iraq war is unlikely to have a conclusion as climactic or satisfactory as Zimmermans novel.
In one of John Ford and John Waynes best collaborations, the World War II drama They Were Expendable, Waynes character, Lt. Rusty Ryan Wilson Chandler Jersey , breaks in when his commander starts to recite the cliche about Theirs but to do And die, Ryan finishes for him. But I dont want to be bored to death running messages! Toby Durrant, the honorable wretch of a hero in The Sandbox, dodges a hail of incoming cliches, is never bored running the messages he bears in locked boxes and learns the hard way that soldiers are.
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