"Oficial, escritor y caballero", Jacinto Antón, en El País, 03.04.2011: https://elpais.com/diario/2011/04/03/eps/1301812016_850215.html

A British soldier recounts his time in military academy through a stint in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hm. I have mixed feelings about this one. At first I really didn't like Hennessey - he seemed arrogant and filled with admiration for his own cleverness - but then I was briefly sucked into his account of soldiering (the details of how the British train their troops was interesting), but then again I became annoyed that the book doesn't do what it says on the tin; he occasionally and very briefly mentions a book he was reading at the time some event happened, but there's no talk of an actual book club at all or even what he thought of the books he read. I was in it for the dynamics of a bunch of soldiers holding a regular book club in a war zone and how that would play out, and I didn't get that at all. In the end it just felt like a dude bragging about how well read he was and also what a cool soldier he turned out to be and isn't that a paradox? I'm such a cool paradox! Blech. But points for the possibly inadvertently interesting bits. *shrug* ( )

This is one book that could have used a different editor. The text is too raw, even the edited parts feel a lot like an e-mail or journal entry, so incomplete and, a lot of the times, not really related one to the next. The über-long phrases used by the author, like two per paragraph, don't help either. And to boot the book didn't feel all that British either ... yes, a "biro" used here and there and some Worcester sauce to top it of but still not what I was looking for.

All that said the passages about his last couple of months in Sangin are probably the best war writing I've ever read, timeless. ( )

Another book on men enjoying war and not justifying it politically or morally. Not in the same class as Junger's War, but the same sentiments: give a boy a gun and he and his friends will have fun until tea-time, give a man a gun and real live targets to shoot at and he's in heaven, or might be soon. ( )

Nunca me terminó de enganchar, no se si termina siendo una joda o un posición del autor para evitar asumir el error de la guerra. de club de lectores ni un f*** libro, una referencia al Quijote por ahí, y otra mas dispersa. Creo que no lo entendí o es malo nomás.- ( )