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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2018, 272 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2019, 272 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Karen Lewis
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"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.
1
Choose Your Own Adventure
IN FEBRUARY 2005 AT an armed forces recruitment center situated between a Pier 1 Imports and a Walmart, in the middle of a strip mall of miscellanea, a Marine Corps recruiter goes over your Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and says you scored high and to take your pick of jobs.
To decide that maybe this was all a mistake, turn around, and walk out of the recruiter's office with no hard feelings, and instead continue your menial-labor job and join the union and marry the girl you're dating and have kids and buy a house in the Midwest and get divorced and hate your job and your ex-wife and never speak to your kids and develop a drinking problem no one wants to talk about because you insist you don't have a problem and burn bridges with anyone who insinuates said drinking problem exists and start voting against your best interests and think maybe it really is the immigrants' fault and the liberals' fault and buy a bumper ...
Eat the Apple showcases memoir as an art form. Young deploys excellent and varied literary skills here, both to witness contemporary military service, and to heal from his tours of duty...continued
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(Reviewed by Karen Lewis).
David Abrams, author of Fobbit and Brave Deeds
Matt Young's Eat the Apple is a standout in a crowded room full of war memoirs. It's fresh, invigorating, and brutally honest in a scorched-earth kind of way. Elliot Ackerman, author of Green on Blue
Eat the Apple is uncompromising. Page after page slices close to the bone with both stylistic and structural swagger. I've never met Matt Young, but he writes about a certain type of young man, a type that comprised many of my closest friends. In his book they come alive again. I've yet to read a truer portrait of them, of us. Eric Fair, author of Consequence: A Memoir
In profanely genuine and courageous prose, Matt Young approaches war with the self-lacerating honesty so few of us are willing to risk. Eat The Apple is the only way a true war story can be told. Matt Gallagher, author of Youngblood
There's a lot of words to describe Eat the Apple. Smart. Filthy. Bold. Electric. What will linger with readers more than anything else, though, is its honesty. This is modern war bare and raw, uncompromised by faulty heroic tales or foggy romantic deeds. Scott Anderson, bestselling author ofLawrence of Arabia
A book unlike any I've ever read. By turns hilarious and wrenching - and shot through with moments of piercing wisdom ... If you want to understand how all that works, and be thoroughly entertained at the same time, read this book. Tim Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award
Matt Young has written the Iliad of the Iraq war - searing as the desert sun, powerful as a rocket-propelled grenade. He live through three hard tours as a Marine and returned to tell this breathtaking tale. Read it if you love your country. Read it if you hate war. His book will strengthen your heart and soul.The United States military draft ended under Nixon in 1973 as the Vietnam conflict wound down. Since then, recruitment has been entirely voluntary. Aspiring soldiers usually go through an enlistment process, like Matt Young did in Eat the Apple. Service choices include: Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, Air Force, or National Guard.
The US Army is the largest branch of service. In addition to combat jobs, the Army supports active medical, nursing and dental corps, along with along with Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG Corp) and the Army Corps of Engineers. The active-duty service requirement for enlisted soldiers ranges from 2-6 years. Medical corps involves a longer commitment.
The Navy began in 1775 and has evolved along with ...
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