I had quite mixed feelings about this book. I was looking for something that got into what a young person goes through in the USMA. I did get some of that but I also got a heavy does of meandering and pop psychology. David Lipsksy spent four years at the academy covering the stories that developed in the book. It wasn't quite clear how he did this. The over of the book presumably shows him in military haircut and uniforms sitting with the cadets.

Lipsky jumps around back and forth through the book covering the lives, trials, and tribulations of a select number of cadets in various stages of graduation or attempted graduation. We get a brief covering of the alphas who achieve as they have before they got there. More focus is reserved for the chronic screw ups, one in particular George Rash. This guy is a monument to failure and it begs the question how did he ever get there in the first place? The standards and weeding process if very very tough. Yet George gets in and from start to finish struggles to make the grade yet he perseveres to the bitter end, well success actually. It doesn't leave one with a very good feeling about the quality they are putting into our armed forces as an officer. Yet this is just one guy and presumably the majority are the successes.

The plus side was you do get a feeling for what these young people go through and the many tough decisions they face with this inexperience. Many will make their parents and us citizens proud and make make us feel good about our great country and the character it builds. ( )

Great insight into West Point. It gave me new respect for the people who will be leading our Army. I'm so glad I read it.

A chronicle of what it's really like to go to West Point. The author followed cadets at the military academy for four years. This environment is completely foreign to me, and one where I'd never survive. It was still interesting to read about. I learned that the "Scent of a Woman" expression "Huah!" is actually used to describe gung-ho-ness. In a June, 2001 graduation address, Paul Wolfowitz talks about surprise attacks and not heeding warnings. He meant Pearl Harbor. A few months later, "instructors are switching on TVs like parting the curtains on the same inexcusable view. 'We're not going to stick with the syllabus today,' one professor declares ... 'This is going to affect your lives more directly than any lesson I have to teach.'" ( )

inspirational—but depressing at the changes to a venerable institution

3808. Absolutely American Four Years at West Point, by David Lipsky (read Oct 1, 2003) In August I read The Long Gray Line, by Rick Atkinson, which tells of the West Point of the 1960s. This book is written by a journalist who spent the years 1998 to 2003 at West Point and though not himself a cadet, tells of various cadets during that time (using a few fake names). It is not very well-organized, and he uses a lot of insider slang, and does not fail to use every heard obscenity (not only quoting, but in his own account of events). The Long Gray Line is a far superior book, and Making the Corps, by Thomas E. Ricks (which I read Dec. 5, 1999) and which is an account of a Marine going thru boot camp is also a far superior book. I'd have quit reading Absolutely American if I had exercised the right to quit whenever I was not liking a book--but then I would not be entitled to say I could assess the book. ( )