Revisiting The Yellow Birds

I wrote a few weeks ago about this debut novel by Iraq War Veteran Kevin Powers that has been called the best book of the year. When I read the book I was moved and amazed at how wonderful the book is.

For a person such as me who is always reading something it sometimes is hard to take a step back and say this is an exceptional book. Not just a great book like I am always saying a book is, but a very outstanding, an exceptional book.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers is exceptional. It is Hemingwayesque. The author appeared on Morning Joe this morning and he was soft spoken and understated. The group around the desk was all in agreement at how wonderful the book was and as Joe Scarborough read the first paragraph it became clear that this book is something rare, something that will become part of the literature of the American canon. With a first line " The war tried to kill us in the spring" what becomes immediately clear is that the blurb on the cover by Tom Wolfe that this is the All Quiet on the Western Front of America's Arab wars is not hyperbole. It is simply the truth.

If you read one book this year. This is the one. There are not enough positive adjectives for how meaningful this book is.