Webb, Brandon. The Making of a Navy SEAL: My Story of Surviving the Toughest Challenge and Training the Best August 25th 2015 by St. Martin's Griffin
ARC from Baker and Taylor
In this memoir, Navy SEAL Webb briefly tells the story of his formative years, during which his family lived on boats and his father once threw him out in the middle of the South Pacific, his years as a SEAL (which included time as a sniper), and his career as a military trainer. It touches briefly on his personal life but concentrates on his various assignments and the life lessons he learned from them.
There are lots of good descriptions about what life is like in the SEALS, and while his missions aren't given too much detail, there is enough to appeal to readers who are fascinated by the military. There wasn't a lot of plot or character development-- this read more like a annotated list of assignments, which made it less enjoyable for me.
The most disappointing part for me was reading the epilogue where Webb gives the briefest possible overview of his activity after 2006. He mentions delivering over a million dollars in cash, finding informers and other secret agent type activities that my readers would ADORE. Perhaps that is another book!
Depending on whether or not this has an Accelerated Reader test for it, and on how many readers I have who are interested in the armed forces, I may buy this. It's a decent length, fairly engaging, and a better choice than some of the adult memoirs on similar topics, since those tend to include questionable language and situations. Probably will purchase.
Do you have Mike Ritland's Navy SEAL Dogs: My Tale of Training Dogs for Combat? It's a YA adaptation of his memoir for adults. I have it checked out (we bought the paperback edition that came out this year), but it's done very well at our libraries.
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