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The Yellow Birds: A Novel by Kevin Powers
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The Yellow Birds: A Novel (original 2012; edition 2012)

by Kevin Powers

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1,8201379,251 (3.76)272
In the midst of a bloody battle in the Iraq War, two soldiers, bound together since basic training, do everything to protect each other from both outside enemies and the internal struggles that come from constant danger.
Member:BenTylerElliott
Title:The Yellow Birds: A Novel
Authors:Kevin Powers
Info:Little, Brown and Company (2012), Edition: First Edition, Hardcover, 240 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:****
Tags:None

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The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (Author) (2012)

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» See also 272 mentions

English (127)  French (2)  Danish (2)  German (2)  Italian (1)  Dutch (1)  Spanish (1)  All languages (136)
Showing 1-5 of 127 (next | show all)
An excellent, but harrowing story of a soldier's experiences in Iraq and how he deals with the aftermath. Powers jumps back and forth between time in country, training and after at home to setup the trauma that the characters go thru and the PTSD that the narrator experiences. Excellent read.

What happened? What fucking happened? That's not even the question, I thought. How is that the question? How do you answer the unanswerable? To say what happened, the mere facts, the disposition of events in time, would come to seem like a kind of treachery. The dominoes of moments, lined up symmetrically, then tumbling backward against the hazy and unsure push of cause, showed only that a fall is every object's destiny. It is not enough to say what happened. Everything happened. Everything fell ( )
1 vote mahsdad | Jul 14, 2023 |
War is a horrible thing and it it should be portrayed that way. But it seemed to me that the author of The Yellow Birds spent more time trying to wright an artsy book about war rather than writing a book about the realities of war. ( )
  kevinkevbo | Jul 14, 2023 |
Written in a somewhat poetic style where the sentences may be like this one: "But home, too, was hard to get an image of, harder still to think beyond the last curved enclosure of the desert, where it seemed I had left the better portion of myself as one among innumerable grains of sand, how in the end the weather-beaten stone is not one stone but only that which has been weathered, a result, an example of slow erosion on a thing by wind or waves that break against it, so that the else of anyone involved ends up deposited like silt spilling out into an estuary, or gathered at the bottom of a river in a city that is all you can remember."
The erosion "on" a thing and the "else" of anyone are quite characteristic. ( )
  markm2315 | Jul 1, 2023 |
CW: PTSD during war and post war, violent and gruesome attack on soldier
Trigger warning: Suicide after not coping with war time violence/actions. ( )
  Mrs_Tapsell_Bookzone | Feb 14, 2023 |
Shortly after starting this book, I would have been predicting a 3 star review; but as I got into it more, I really enjoyed the feelings and descriptions about a soldier's experiences with death, war, and having to come back to the "real" world afterwards.

Have you ever thought you could not imagine the hell that soldiers have to go through? The author does a great job in describing just that. ( )
1 vote rjdycus | Dec 19, 2022 |
Showing 1-5 of 127 (next | show all)
A remarkable, beautifully understated, powerful, yet poised novel.
 
The novel moves, fitfully, through Virginia and Iraq and Germany and New Jersey and Kentucky, from 2003 to 2009. Recalling the war, Bartle says, is “like putting a puzzle together from behind: the shapes familiar, the picture quickly fading, the muted tan of the cardboard backing a tease at wholeness and completion.” This serves the story in two ways. First, it turns readers into active participants, enlisting them in a sense as co-authors who fit together the many memories and guess at what terrible secret lies in wait, the truth behind Murphy’s death. Because they lean forward instead of back, because they participate in piecing together the puzzle, they are made more culpable.

Then too, the fractured structure replicates the book’s themes. Like a chase scene made up of sentences that run on and on and ultimately leave readers breathless, or like a concert description that stops and starts, that swings and sways, that makes us stamp our feet and clap our hands — the nonlinear design of Powers’s novel is a beautifully brutal example of style matching content. War destroys. It doesn’t just rip through bone and muscle, stone and steel; it fragments the mind as a fist to a mirror might create thousands of bloodied, glittering shards.
 
...and while few will have expected the war in Iraq to bring forth a novel that can stand beside All Quiet on the Western Front or The Red Badge of Courage, The Yellow Birds does just that, for our time, as those books did for theirs.
added by Milesc | editThe Guardian, John Burnside (Aug 31, 2012)
 

» Add other authors (6 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Powers, KevinAuthorprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Abelsen, PeterTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Graham, HolterNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
A yellow bird   With a yellow bill   Was perched upon   My windowsill     I lured him in   With a piece of bread   And then I smashed   His fucking head.. ----- Traditional U.S. Army Marching Cadence ------
To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetfull of evils past, is a mercifull provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and eveil dayes, and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.   ----- Sir Thomas Browne
Dedication
For my wife
Στη γυναίκα μου
First words
The war tried to kill us in the spring.
Quotations
If you get back to the States in your head before your ass is there too, then you are a fucking dead man.
It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said, it wasn't much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow.
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In the midst of a bloody battle in the Iraq War, two soldiers, bound together since basic training, do everything to protect each other from both outside enemies and the internal struggles that come from constant danger.

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Book description
Bartle , 21 ans , est soldat en Irak à Al Tafar. Depuis l'entraînement , lui et Murph , 18 an sont inseparables . Bartle a fait la promesse de le ramener vivant au pays . Une promesse qu'il n'a pas pu tenir ... Murphy hante dès lors ses rêves de soldat et , plus tard de veteran.
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