Nicholas Irving

I actually liked this book quite a bit more than Irving’s first book, which was kinda heavy on chest pounding and locker room talk. Sure that comes with the territory, but there’s less of it in this book. It lands as more introspective and honest. There are also some good technical shooting reminders -eg even The Reaper has to remember mechanical optic offset after putting some rounds in the dirt - if he needs to remember these fundamentals and can make that mistake so must we remember. show more Irving’s sharp intelligence and wit also come through more clearly for me in this book, more glimpses of the man who once said (as retold in The Killing School) he hallucinated that George Foreman was with him and offering some meat cooked in a Foreman grill when Irving was sleep deprived) are here. I appreciated that and really enjoyed this book. I may well give some of his fiction a try. Recommended. show less

This book is somehow a lot better than Irv’s first book. It was basically a bunch of incidents throughout his deployments, ostensibly less of a coherent narrative than the first book, but actually ended up both having better individual anecdotes and a more meaningful overall message.

This book will make some people very uncomfortable. And rightly so - it contains graphic depictions of people being killed and wounded, and several other very unpleasant and difficult situations.

It also is a description of someone who is charged with killing people, and who takes a certain amount of pride in how well he does that job.

I've read a fairly good amount of military books, war biographies and memoirs. Some of them are very very good, like the works of Robert Leckie and Eugene show more Sledge. Many are average, and a great deal are truly awful. The better ones tend to be, not unsurprisingly, written by professional writers who are describing their own experiences in combat, such as Leckie. (BTW, I was given this book by the publisher, in exchange for a possible review of it).

It's hard to get a sense of a person in an autobiography written with a ghostwriter, as author Nicholas Irving did with his co-author Gary Brozek. So much of a story like his comes down to who he actually is, how he tells his own story, how much of a feel for the real man we get in reading his book. That's much harder to do when what we are reading is filtered through the writing style of a ghostwriter.

The name of this book put me off. The Reaper. It felt self-aggrandizing, and made me think that I was picking up another look-at-me-and-how-great-I-am-for-killing-people kind of book, a feeling I got when I read the late Chris Kyle's service memoir. The first few chapters didn't do a lot to change that impression. It very well may be that the title was a product of the publisher - it's hard to deny that it's catchy and grabs the eye.

But I'm glad I held on and finished the book. I don't know whether it was me and my preconceived notions about the work finally being overtaken by the story itself, or if the writing got better as I went along - but as I was nearing the end, I realized that I at least felt I had some idea of the character of Irving, and why he was telling us this story. I stopped over-analyzing and judging, and just read.

Chapter six, "The Chechen Comes Calling", and the chapters immediately after that one, were very engaging, and again, this is when I felt I was beginning to recognize and understand Irving a small amount. It also became clear to me as I neared the end that all of Irving's combat experiences took place before he was 24 years old, a very young age to have to come to grips with being a quite successful professional killer.

It's the military's job to kill people and break things. It's very difficult for people who have not been in that situation to hear or read about the satisfaction and even joy that some feel when they do their job well. Despite my own military background, I sometimes share that discomfort. This is a tale well told, and for good and bad, Irving opened up very private experiences for other to read and learn from. I respect and salute his service, and his honesty. show less

Reaper: Ghost Target by Nicholas Irving and A.J.Tata is my first sniper fiction. This is a face paced political-military thriller with a good lead and gripping story. Vick "The Reaper" Harwood is based on the author himself. I read an online interview and found out the "Chechen" is real. The story reminds me a bit of the movie "Shooter" (novel by Stephen Hunter [b:Point of Impact|127712|Point of Impact (Bob Lee Swagger, #1)|Stephen show more Hunter|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1315656617l/127712._SY75_.jpg|3870], which I haven't yet read). I'll be reading book #2! show less