Danger Close
by Michael Phillip Yon

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Book Reviews of Danger Close

Book Review: The brother I never had -a 14year old's view.
Summary: 5 Stars

Seeing the fun and joy of the beginning of his life is like looking at my own at a certain age, you become one with the book. The very good descriptive way that he (Mike Yon of course) tells you his life, is amazing. The feelings coming through reading this book is tough, I had to lay the book down for a week.

The hell he went through after his first 7 years was amazing, the whole book is amazing if you ask me.

The book gives you faith, it makes you wanna fight. Parts of my life has been hard. I've had times when I thought seriously about suicide (planing it and all), then I thought it was weak and that I was a fighter so way would I do it? But then I was bouncing between those options becuz of the question "why live?". Now I can truthfully say that I won't help death dealing with me. This book gave me faith, strength and something that I really need and needed, a big brother. The brother I never had. Someone to look upto. Someone you in a way you wanna become, but in the end you don't. You realize the pain that is everywhere, in your life, and his life. Why try to get his when you can change yours? Lot's of questions like this came up but more about confidence. Now I can say "I won't give up!" "I will never give up, I will make it!". That is something I couldn't do before.

I think that everybody either needs help or some kinda encouragement. In my case encouragment. This book won't tell you you're the best and that he is a super-man-invincible-green-beret rather it will make you stand up and see how horrible life can be, and at the same time there is a away out. I guess it's not the same thing as making Special Forces training and it's not telling you what todo, it's showing you that you can make a good thing out of bad experience. That's my point of view.

A review can't justify this book, it will teach you, make you grow up, make you human, learn you not to give up. and a lot more.

Description of book: Astonishing.

Military have always been in the back of my head, now I know I wanna become a special forces soldier.

Summary of Danger Close

Danger Close is the sometimes funny, sometimes moving, but always compelling account of a seemingly typical small boy becoming an exceptional young man. It ranges through the ordinary to the appalling, the grim and the joyous, the universally shared and the nearly unimaginable, all held together by the increasingly perceptive insights of the author.

At first glance, Danger Close reads like an adventure story, one that begins with the fateful bar scene, flashes back through a guts-and-glory retelling of what it takes to be accepted into one of the country's elite unconventional warfare units, and ends with Yon's acquittal of the charges. Yet Yon's self-published memoir simultaneously proves to be a coming-of-age story of a fiercely unique sort. Yon's mother died when he was only seven, and that irreparable loss, combined with the neglect that he later suffered at the hands of his father and the refuge he found with his grandparents and his friends, creates the emotional anchor of the book. Yon handles such a complex combination of subject matter in a free-form, associative style, juxtaposing scenes of intensive weapons training, for example, with stories of life lessons he learned from his grandfather. The result is winningly rough around the edges: Danger Close is exuberant and thoughtful, tender and violent, and, for the most part, it works. Writing, for Yon, like joining the Army, was about having "demons to slay. Big, mean demons that haunted and chased me. I was going to kill them." --Svenja Soldovieri

Family & Childhood Books

• Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > Family & Childhood
• Leaders & Notable People > Military
• Memoirs