|
|
Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life (Mass Market Paperback) (Paperback)
by John McCain
| Category:
Character education, Values and beliefs, American society |
| Market price: ¥ 110.00
MSL price:
¥ 98.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A quick read, with profound examinations of what it takes to desire courage within our lives and how to live in pursuit of it everyday. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
Detail |
Author |
Description |
Excerpt |
Reviews |
|
|
|
Author: John McCain
Publisher: Ballantine Books; Reprint edition
Pub. in: July, 2008
ISBN: 0345513347
Pages: 224
Measurements: 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01567
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0345513342
|
|
Rate this product:
|
|
- Awards & Credential -
New York Times bestseller. |
|
- MSL Picks -
This extended essay on courage comes from a man who has displayed it in abundance, although not surprisingly, he seeks to deny or minimize that. Senator John McCain endured years of physical and psychological torture as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war and has gone on to display courage of a different, but no less real sort, in the political arena.
McCain introduces us to a variety of people who have displayed the dimensions of courage - Medal of Honor winner Sgt. Roy Benavidez, who rescued eight of his comrades in Cambodia despite suffering grievous wounds that would leave him hospitalized for months; Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who has endured house arrest, separation from her family and other depravations in her battle to secure freedom for the peoples of Burma; civil rights leader John Lewis; a Baltimore mother who paid the ultimate price for fighting the drug dealers in her neighborhood; and others, both famous and obscure.
Courage is not easy to define, McCain suggests. For years he thought Hemingway's famous phrase ("grace under pressure") might be as good as any, but explains how decades of thinking and experience have led him to a deeper understanding, if not a more precise definition, of this significant human quality. Courage has many dimensions, he suggests; though physical bravery is often an element of it, it's not a necessity. What does seem to be an absolute, in McCain's view, is that for an action to be truly courageous it must be grounded in firm moral beliefs. Senator McCain has given us a worthwhile, empowering book.
(From quoting William C. Hall, USA)
|
|
Customers who bought this product also bought:
|
|
After a career in the U.S. Navy and two terms as a U.S. representative, JOHN McCAIN was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1986 and reelected in 1992 and 1998. He and his wife, Cindy, reside in Phoenix, Arizona.
MARK SALTER has worked on Senator McCain’s staff for fourteen years and is the co-author with McCain of Faith of My Fathers and Worth the Fighting For. Hired as a legislative assistant in 1989, Salter has served as the senator’s administrative assistant for more than a decade. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with his wife, Diane, and their two daughters.
|
|
From Publisher
"Courage,” Winston Churchill explained, is “the first of human qualities... because it guarantees all the others.” As a naval officer, P.O.W., and one of America’s most admired political leaders, John McCain has seen countless acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. Now, in this inspiring meditation on courage, he shares his most cherished stories of ordinary individuals who have risked everything to defend the people and principles they hold most dear.
"We are taught to understand, correctly, that courage is not the absence of fear but the capacity for action despite our fears,” McCain reminds us, as a way of introducing the stories of figures both famous and obscure that he finds most compelling - from the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to Sgt. Roy Benavidez, who ignored his own well-being to rescue eight of his men from an ambush in the Vietnam jungle; from 1960s civil rights leader John Lewis, who wrote, “When I care about something, I’m prepared to take the long, hard road,” to Hannah Senesh, who, in protecting her comrades in the Hungarian resistance against Hitler’s SS, chose a martyr’s death over a despot’s mercy.
These are some of the examples McCain turns to for inspiration and offers to others to help them summon the resolve to be both good and great. He explains the value of courage in both everyday actions and extraordinary feats. We learn why moral principles and physical courage are often not distinct quantities but two sides of the same coin. Most of all, readers discover how sometimes simply setting the right example can be the ultimate act of courage.
Written by one of our most respected public figures, Why Courage Matters is that rare book with a message both timely and timeless. This is a work for anyone seeking to understand how the mystery and gift of courage can empower us and change our lives.
|
“We’re all afraid of something. Some have more fears than others. The one we must all guard against is the fear of ourselves. Don’t let the sensation of fear convince you that you’re too weak to have courage. Fear is the opportunity for courage, not proof of cowardice. No one is born a coward. We were meant to love. And we were meant to have courage for it. So be brave. The rest is easy.” Quoted from the book
Chapter 1
A kind of madness" is how a friend of mine, a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, described the courage displayed by men whose battlefield heroics had earned them the Medal of Honor. "It's impossible to comprehend, really, even if you witness it... It's one mad moment. You never think anyone you know is really capable of it. Not even the toughest, bravest, best men in the company. They're as surprised as anyone to see it. And if someone does do it, and lives, they probably never do it again. You might think the guy who's always running around in a fight, exposing himself to enemy fire, yelling a lot, might do it. But that's not what happens. They just get killed usually."
Select at random a dozen Medal of Honor recipients and read the citations that accompany their decorations. Some will describe a single lonely act of heroism, one man's self-sacrifice that saved the lives of his comrades, who will remember the act for the rest of their lives with feelings of gratitude and lasting obligation mixed with something that feels much like shame-shame that one's life, no matter how good and useful, no matter how honorable, might not deserve to have been ransomed at such a cost. All the citations will record acts of great heroism, of course. But some might seem plausible, if just barely so. The reader might even fantasize himself capable of such heroism, under extreme circumstances, without feeling too ashamed of the presumption. Maybe you are. At least one, however, will tell of such incredible daring, such epic courage, that no witness to it could imagine himself, or anyone he knows, capable of it. It might be the story of Roy Benavidez.
Special Forces master sergeant Roy Benavidez was the son of a Texas sharecropper. Orphaned at a young age, quiet and mistaken as slow, derided as a "dumb Mexican" by his classmates, he left school in the eighth grade to work in the cotton fields. He joined the army at nineteen. On his first tour in Vietnam, in 1964, he stepped on a land mine. Army doctors thought the wound would be permanently crippling. It wasn't. He recovered and became a Green Beret.
During his second combat tour, in the early morning of May 2, 1968, in Loc Ninh, Vietnam, Sergeant Benavidez monitored by radio a twelve-man reconnaissance patrol. Three Green Berets, friends of his, and nine Montagnard tribesmen had been dropped in the dense jungle west of Loc Ninh, just inside Cambodia. No man aboard the low-flying helicopters beating noisily toward the landing zone that morning could have been unaware of how dangerous the assignment was. Considered an enemy sanctuary, the area was known to be vigilantly patrolled by a sizable force of the North Vietnamese army intent on keeping it so. Once on the ground, the twelve men were almost immediately engaged by the enemy and soon surrounded by a force that grew to a battalion.
The mission had been a mistake, and three helicopters were ordered to evacuate the besieged patrol. Fierce small arms and antiaircraft fire, wounding several crew members, forced the helicopters to return to base. Listening on the radio, Benavidez heard one of his friends scream, "Get us out of here!" and, "So much shooting it sounded like a popcorn machine." He jumped into one of the returning helicopters, volunteering for a second evacuation attempt. When he arrived at the scene, he found that none of the patrol had made it to the landing zone. Four were already dead, including the team leader, and the other eight were wounded and unable to move. Carrying a knife and a medic bag, Benavidez made the sign of the cross, leapt from the helicopter hovering ten feet off the ground, and ran seventy yards to his injured comrades. Before he reached them, he was shot in the leg, face, and head. He got up and kept moving.
When he reached their position, he armed himself with an enemy rifle, began to treat the wounded, reposition them, distribute ammunition, and call in air strikes. He threw smoke grenades to indicate their location and ordered the helicopter pilot to come in close to pick up the wounded. He dragged four of the wounded aboard, and then, while under intense fire and returning fire with his captured weapon, he ran alongside the helicopter as it flew just a few feet off the ground toward the others. He got the rest of the wounded aboard, as well as the dead, except for the fallen team leader. As he raced to retrieve his body, and the classified documents the dead man had carried, he was shot in the stomach and grenade fragments cut into his back.
Before he could make his way back toward the helicopter, the pilot was fatally wounded and the aircraft crashed upside down. He helped the wounded escape the burning wreckage and organized them in a defensive perimeter. He called for air strikes and fire from circling gunships to suppress the ever increasing enemy fire enough to allow another evacuation attempt. Critically wounded, Benavidez moved constantly along the perimeter, bringing water and ammunition to the defenders, treating their wounds, encouraging them to hold on. He sustained several more gunshot wounds, but he continued to fight. For six hours.
When another extraction helicopter landed, he helped the wounded toward it, one and two at a time. On his second trip, an enemy soldier ran up behind him and struck him with his rifle butt. Sergeant Benavidez turned to close with the man and his bayonet and fought him, hand to hand, to the death. Wounded again, he recovered the rest of his comrades. As the last were lifted onto the helicopter, he exchanged more gunfire with the enemy, killing two more Vietnamese soldiers, and then ran back to collect the classified documents before at last climbing aboard and collapsing, apparently dead.
The army doctor back at Loc Ninh thought him dead anyway. Bleeding profusely, his intestines spilling from his stomach wounds, completely immobile, and unable to speak, Benavidez was placed into a body bag. As the doctor began to pull up the black shroud's zipper, Roy Benavidez spit in his face. They flew him to Saigon for surgery, where he began a year in hospitals recovering from seven serious gunshot wounds, twenty-eight shrapnel wounds, and bayonet wounds in both arms.
Hard to believe, isn't it, what this one man did? And why? Because his buddies called out to him? Because the training just took over? Because it was automatic, he was in the moment, aware of what was required of him but senseless to the probable futility of his efforts? These are the sort of explanations you usually hear from someone who has distinguished himself in battle. They really don't help us understand. They mean something, but as an explanation for that kind of heroism, they are as unenlightening to me as haiku poetry. What kind of training prepares you to do that? What kind of unit solidarity, how great the love and trust for the man to your right and your left, inspires you to the superhuman heroics of Roy Benavidez?
I'll be damned if I know. I was trained to be an aviator, not a Special Forces commando. But how does anyone-Green Beret, navy SEAL, whatever-learn to be that brave? How do you build that kind of courage in someone? It certainly appears to be superhuman and incomprehensible to those with a more human-size supply, brave and resourceful though they may be. I can't explain it. No one I know can.
We are taught to understand, correctly, that courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity for action despite our fears. Does anyone have that great a store of courage that he would think himself capable of meaningful action with the eruption of fear that any one of us would have felt rise in our throats and burn our hearts were we to find ourselves in the hopeless situation of Roy Benavidez? I wouldn't. I don't know anyone who would, and I've known some very brave men. I doubt very much Roy Benavidez thought he would. I would challenge the sanity of any reader who imagines the possibility of possessing such mastery over fear. It's not to be expected in anyone. No courage could contend with such fear, and animate our limbs, and control our minds. Fear would have to be vanquished completely.
Roy Benavidez jumped off the helicopter, acutely aware of the situation, perhaps, of the enemy's strength, of their location, of the circumstances of his comrades, of what needed to be done, but somehow insensate to the hopelessness of it all, to the gravity of his wounds, to the futility of fighting on. What pushed him? A tsunami of adrenaline? What carried him through? A sublime fatalism, driven by love or sense of duty to resign himself completely to the situation, whatever its horrors, and make his last hour his greatest? We can't know. All we can know is that in one moment of madness, six hours long, Roy Benavidez became to the men he saved, and maybe to himself, an avenging angel of God, masterful, indomitable, and utterly fearless. |
|
Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2008-11-16 00:00>
After two stirring memoirs, Senator McCain turns in a slim meditation on the nature of courage. Suggesting the definition of courage has been stretched thin in contemporary parlance, where it can be applied to acts as insignificant as cutting or not cutting one's hair, McCain seeks to return to the word's fundamental meaning not just of "the capacity for action despite our fears" but self-sacrifice for the benefit of others as well as for oneself. Although he addresses valorous conduct by American soldiers in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, he is, as always, modestly self-critical of his own experiences in Vietnam (although he and his fellow POWs turned to one another for moral support on a daily basis, he confesses, "I was not always a match for my enemies"). In an especially moving chapter, he recounts the participation of his congressional colleague John Lewis in the nonviolent wing of the Civil Rights movement. Other sections discuss the Navajo leaders Manuelito and Barboncito, Jewish freedom fighter Hannah Senesh and Burmese dissident (and Nobel Peace Prize recipient) Aung San Suu Kyi. These compelling life stories stand up against the best passages of McCain's previous works. Alas, his writing becomes more vague and less interesting when he shifts to a more abstract discussion of the need for courage in the post–September 11 era. One of McCain's greatest strengths as a writer has been that he doesn't sound like just another politician, and while the drop-off in quality here isn't significant, it is noticeable. |
The Washington Post Book World (MSL quote), USA
<2008-11-16 00:00>
McCain the man remains one of the most inspiring public figures of his generation. |
A guest reviewer (MSL quote), USA
<2008-11-16 00:00>
McCain makes me laugh, he makes me cry. In between McCain's explanations of what defines courage and what doesn't, he provides examples of people the world over who have demonstrated extraordinary acts of courage that will move you to tears. He made me laugh when he writes of how most parents usually try to teach their children to be brave as when they fall off a bicycle or horse. "We're teaching them physical skills. We're teaching them to be strong... We're building their confidence and giving them hope... These are elements of courage, but not the whole virtue... They might grow up and climb mountains or become risk-taking entrepreneurs. But is that all we think courage is? Without other instruction, they could turn out to be Enron executives.(!) They had daring, but they lacked ethics. They lacked a sense of honor, and they lacked courage."
I brought this book with me on a recent trip to bear country where I intended to read it in between hikes in the Sierras. I thought it would come in handy, for he writes, "Face the experience with quiet assurance or with a look that reflects stark terror", good advice when faced with a 300 pound bear! I spent my time reading mountaineering 101 books instead and this one got shelved for the time being (no bears in sight).
In the closing chapter, he offers advice to those who witnessed events in NYC who are still traumatized, suffering from anxieties. "Build your courage...We have something worth being brave for: liberty and justice. Feel yourself part of that grand enterprise, empowered by it, and dread the emptiness of a life that is unattached to noble purpose." "We're all afraid of something...Don't let the sensation of fear convince you that you're too weak to have courage. Fear is the opportunity for courage, not proof of cowardice."
Great practical advice, better stuff than that found in medicine bottles. |
|
|
|
|
