Oct 13 2020

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Non-fiction Text Review #1 – Where Men Win Glory and Books Fall Short

Posted at 10:26 am under Uncategorized

Jon Krakauer’s book “Where Men Win Glory” tells the incredible story of Pat Tillman and his ascension from NFL’s most feared safety to the Army’s most feared Ranger. This book will walk you through, in great detail, the entire life of Pat Tillman from early on to his trip to Afghanistan in 2004. This detail, however, hurts the book in some ways, in my opinion, and causes it to fall a little short of expectations.

Let me put this out there first, I am not a great reader, nor do I enjoy reading large books. This being said, if a story catches my attention, it is very tough for me to put the book down. That simply didn’t happen with “Where Men Win Glory” through the first 200 pages or so. Frankly, I think the book could have been told in about half the amount of time that it took Krakauer to write it. It felt, to me, like a student trying to get to the word count on an essay, and throwing in random facts and nuggets about Tillman to reach some kind of page count or word count. This would be the main criticism for the book.

Now, what does this book do well? Once you get to the good stuff, it does a lot of things very well. The retelling of Tillman’s story puts you right in the middle of the action. The detail that Krakauer uses to retell Tillman’s horrific and easily preventable death is something that is unrivaled by many, and paints a sad but detailed picture as to how his life came to an end.

The other important aspect that Krakauer dives into is the way that the Bush campaign used Tillman’s death in their own way to promote patriotism. Krakauer makes sure that all of his bases are covered when talking about Tillman’s death and the false narratives that were spread about how he died. It is an unfortunate, but important part of the story that Krakauer makes sure to cover so that the entire story of Tillman is told the way it really happened.

Overall, I would give “Where Men Win Glory” a 3 out of 5 stars. If the book were graded on the final 75-100 pages, it would get a much better rating. However, the fluff used at the beginning hurts the book’s ability to be a “page-turner.” This is a shame. The story of Tillman’s death should be something that is very widely known and Krakauer does a good job of telling the story. He just takes too long to get to the point which could keep some people from reaching the end to truly found out what happened to Tillman.

One response so far

One Response to “Non-fiction Text Review #1 – Where Men Win Glory and Books Fall Short”

  1. fuglsangon 19 Oct 2020 at 2:56 pm 1

    I appreciate the effort in doing something you dislike, Daniel.

    Krakauer is a detail guy, and I don’t think he was trying to boost his word count. If you think about the media world today, and how Tillman’s story was being used by others, I think he was getting his facts straight so that no one could question his accuracy.

    I am interested in what you think the “good stuff” was, and why you found it appealing. Since Krakauer is writing about something that happened in the past, that he didn’t witness, where does he get his information. Whose eyes is the story told through. I’m assuming it was his fellow soldiers.

    How/Where else does Krakauer collect information? And how does he deal with the term “glory”?

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