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Kevin Powers

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The Yellow Birds: A Novel Paperback – April 30, 2013

by Kevin Powers (Author)

2,432

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Finalist for the National Book Award, The Yellow Birds is the harrowing story of two young soldiers trying to stay alive in Iraq.

"The war tried to kill us in the spring." So begins this powerful account of friendship and loss.

In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. Bound together since basic training when Bartle makes a promise to bring Murphy safely home, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for.

In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes actions he could never have imagined.

With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel that is destined to become a classic.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Back Bay Books
Publication date

April 30, 2013
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

0316219347
ISBN-13

978-0316219341
Lexile measure

1010L
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The All Quiet on the Western Front of America's Arab wars."―Tom Wolfe

"The Yellow Birds is harrowing, inexplicably beautiful, and utterly, urgently necessary."―Ann Patchett

"A remarkable first novel...The Yellow Birds is brilliantly observed and deeply affecting: at once a freshly imagined bildungsroman about a soldier's coming of age, a harrowing story about the friendship of two young men trying to stay alive on the battlefield in Iraq, and a philosophical parable about the loss of innocence and the uses of memory...Extraordinary."―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"This is a novel I've been waiting for. The Yellow Birds is born from experience and rendered with compassion and intelligence."―Alice Sebold

"Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds is written with an intensity which is deeply compelling; every moment, every memory, every object, every move, are conjured up with a fierce and exact concentration and sense of truth."―Colm Toibin

"Compelling, brilliantly written, and heart-breakingly true, The Yellow Birds belongs in the same category as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. Thus far the definitive novel of our long wars in the Middle East; this book is certain to be read and taught for generations to come."―Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust

"A novel about the poetry and the pity of war...Powers writes with a rawness that brings the sights and smells as well as the trauma and decay of war home to the reader."―Kirkus

"Reading The Yellow Birds I became certain that I was in the presence of a text that will win plaudits, become a classic, and hold future narratives of the war to a higher standard....a superb literary achievement."―Chris Cleave

"Kevin Powers has delivered an exceptional novel from the war in Iraq, written in clean, evocative prose, lyric and graphic, in assured rhythms, a story for today and tomorrow and the next."―Daniel Woodrell

"Powers has created a powerful work of art that captures the complexity and life altering realities of combat service. This book will endure. Read it and then put it way up on that high rare shelf alongside Ernest Hemingway and Tim O'Brien."―Anthony Swofford

"We haven't just been waiting for a great novel to come out of the Iraq War, our 21st century Vietnam; we have also been waiting for something more important, a work of art that illuminates our flawed and complex and striving humanity behind all such wars. At last we have both in Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds."―Robert Olen Butler

"Thoughtful and analytical, the novel resonates as an accurate and deeply felt portrayal of the effects of post-combat syndrome as experienced by soldiers in the disorienting war in Iraq. "―Library Journal, starred review

"This moving debut from Powers (a former Army machine gunner) is a study of combat, guilt, and friendship forged under fire....Powers's style and story are haunting."―Publisher's Weekly, starred review

About the Author

Kevin Powers is the author of The Yellow Birds, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and was a National Book Award Finalist, as well as Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, a collection of poetry. He was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, and holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. He served in the US Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (April 30, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316219347
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316219341
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1010L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #289,233 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,942 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #3,568 in War Fiction (Books)
- #16,214 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
2,432

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Kevin Powers

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Kevin Powers is the author of The Yellow Birds, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and was a National Book Award Finalist. He was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, and holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. He served in the US Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar.

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4.1 out of 5

2,432 global ratings

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Jill I. Shtulman

"All pain is the same. Only the details are different."

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2012

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Some people are just born to write. Kevin Powers, in this debut book, is certainly one of them. The Yellow Birds is breathtaking good, profoundly insightful and written with an incredible amount of emotional precision.

Some might compare it to other war-themed books: The Naked and the Dead, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Things They Carried, or even A Separate Peace. They would, in my opinion, be misguided.

This is not the quintessential book about the Iraqi War, even though the settings are mainly the battlefield of Iraq and "home", in this case, Richmond, Virginia. Rather, it is a book about all wars and all situations that force us to live with becoming less than human.

What happens, Kevin Powers postulates, when youngsters - barely out of their teens - must go against everything they've been taught as moral? Is there "any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone..."

This is a book about those who became unaware "of even our own savagery now: the beatings and the kicked dogs, the searches and the sheer brutality of our presence." It is about the promise that one boy - John Bartle -- makes to another boy's mother that he cannot possibly keep. It is about someone who cannot return to the ordinary despite his most fervent wishes: "If I could not forget, then I'd hope to be forgotten."

And most of all, it's about young men who should be in the height of life who are forced to be on intimate knowledge with death: "It seems absurd now that we saw each death as an affirmation of our lives. That each one of those deaths belonged to a time and that therefore that time was not ours. We didn't know the list was limitless."

None of the quotes I used reflect the pure elegiac beauty of the prose, beginning with the first line: `The war tried to kill us in the spring." The war could be any war or anything that creates detachment and devalues human life. "The world makes liars of us all," Kevin Powers writes at one point. Yet in this magnificent prose, the truth shines through.

21 people found this helpful

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Jeremy Kingsbury

Great Writing

Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2014

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I personally enjoyed reading this because it's not your typical war novel. The one's I've read in the past have been very predictible and stereotypical. So this is a refreshing change to the genre. I served in the military myself for over 15 years, in the infantry and also in a transportation unit for a time. Being an 11B is an experience in itself and not just at war. During my service I was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq 03-04 and Afghanistan 07-08. So it was good to read something that had to do directly with experiences in these wars. I felt the main character of this novel is fairly well developed and I got a good sense of him through out the novel. All other characters seemed really to be there just to show the reader what he learned from them or how they influenced his experience. I thought that was done very effectively. This book is really for readers with little or no experience with the military, which is another reason I like it. It's not filled with acronyms and jargon that only people that have served will understand. This book opens up a war experience to people who may otherwise have not read a novel like this. It's great that it does this and has the potential to help people understand the effect war can have on people and why it changes them so much. Great book and I would recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered, what it's like to serve at war.

One person found this helpful

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BookNut3000

The next entry to the canon of American War Literature

Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2012

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Bought this because of the review in the Guardian. Decided anything getting compared to All Quiet on the Western Front and The Red Badge of Courage deserved a shot. And that is squarely where this book belongs. To that list I'd add The Things We Carried, also by a combat veteran. It's a real story of men in combat and the toll it takes on them, both during and afterward. This is one of those books that has a million different lines that will have you thinking about things in a different way, like this one after a friend of the narrator is killed:

"I'd been trained to think war was the great unifier, that it brought people closer together than any other activity on earth. Bullshit. War is the great maker of solipsists: how are you going to save my life today?"

As far as the plot, it is about one man trying to keep his friend alive (as his friend begins to crack up) during a tour of duty in Iraq; interspersed with his attempts, after the war, to understand a terrible crime he ends up committing.

The author was a machinegunner in a Iraq; whether this book is his way of processing his experiences or not, it is a thoughtful and philosophical work. If you are looking for a Tom Clancy book, or Seal Team Six book--something that depicts men in combat as fearless machines--this is not the right book for you. There is violence, but it is real, not cartoonish; the people killing and dying come across as real people. Like All Quiet on the Western Front, it is more about how real people actually respond to these situations than how some action-hero would.

Which is a long way of saying this is literature, rather than entertainment. There are no political ramblings, no saying that America is better (or worse) than its enemies; it is about people and how they react to being at war. There is no question this thing is going to take its place in the list of serious books about war and, more generally, the human condition. It's short but it will stay in your head a long time.

32 people found this helpful

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Graham

Stunning

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 2, 2023

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Beautiful, beautiful book. Lyrical prose, emotional intelligence by the bucketload and further evidence of just what a talent Kevin Powers is. It tells the story of a young man who serves in Iraq and finds it just about impossible to settle back in once he returns home. As premises go, this represents familiar territory, already covered in so many novels, but if it's been better handled I'd love to know the title and author because I'll be all over it like a shot.

Three wonderful scenes stand out, and if you've read the book already you'll know what I'm talking about. One is Bart's initial return where he is being driven home by his mother and watching the familiar scenery flash past but is unable to stare at it for long without instinctively looking for potential cover he can use to hide from the enemy. Another is the death of a young female medic which causes Bart's only close friend out there to unravel completely. The third is an amazing image which involves chalk marks on the cell in which Bart is staying and how they come to represent the bars rather than the memories he's trying to store up. You've no soul if you read this without being deeply affected.

I was absolutely blown away by this author's latest novel, A Line In The Sand, which I stumbled across a few months ago. This debut novel is just as impressive. It walked away with any number of prizes and deserves to bring massive recognition to a major talent. If you can't survive without a life and death crisis at the end of every chapter and huge coincidences which have less to do with real life than the need to come up with a killer twist, this may well not be for you. If, on the other hand, you like to linger over a paragraph and marvel at the beauty of the language and the almost heart-breaking empathy brought to bear by the author, go for it. I'm not sure I've ever read anyhing which brings home the torment of PTSD as effectively as this. I can't recommend him highly enough.

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on June 12, 2017

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Great read, written like poetry, and resonates on many levels

Jim KABLE

War and Reality Detachment

Reviewed in Australia on May 25, 2019

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Clarity of perspective - poetic even - from Kevin Powers - about the terrible effects on human beings of being in a war - of those who somehow survive - and of the civilians and comrades who endure the grieving for those sacrificed - for god alone knows what geopolitical or economic resources reasons. This is a classic piece of literature which should be required reading for all politicians/bureaucrats - especially those who have themselves never been near a war unless calling for them and sending others to them.

annamark

Magnifique,triste et inoubliable

Reviewed in France on October 4, 2013

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Histoire de guerre très forte, écrite comme un reportage, mais qui est un roman - quand même écrit par un tireur de l'armée américaine qui a passé du temps en Afghanistan. Sur les horreurs de la guerre vécues et décrites par un jeune soldat et sa difficulté de retour à la vie 'normale'. Ses belles descriptions des paysages contrastent fortement avec la brutalité de la mort et le coût en vies humaines. Extrêmement bien écrit. Très émouvant, car les soldats sont tellement jeunes et la guerre qu'ils découvrent ne correspondent en rien à ce qu'ils pensaient quand ils sont partis 'servir leur patrie'.
Chose importante - il vaut mieux le lire en français si vous ne parlez pas anglais parfaitement , car il est très riche en vocabulaire et ce sera vraiment dommage de ne comprendre que les grandes lignes.

2 people found this helpful

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Mario Marola

Testimonianza di un reduce dalla guerra in Iracq.

Reviewed in Italy on February 28, 2013

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Le soffferenze e i disagi, fisici e psicologici, di un giovane soldato americano in Iracq. Una testimonianza diretta che non troviamo nelle cronache dei telegiornali o dei quotidiani.

3 people found this helpful

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