Memoir remains my genre of choice, just ahead of historical fiction, but this example departs somewhat from the usual subject matter. It’s the recollections of a private who served in Operation Desert Storm. He says at the outset that he made no effort to research the facts or to put his role into a broader context. He wanted to show only what he experienced.

In addition to its subject matter, this book is unusual in having successfully gotten around the critical standards I normally apply to self-published authors. That is to say, I know it was handled by a POD house, and I’m aware of problems such as heavy use of question marks on sentences that are not questions, and repeatedly spelling “sight” as “site,” etc. — and yet this time I’m OK with that. The author’s approach is to present himself as just a dumb private (as opposed to, say, the officer at the end “with his fancy college education … [and] shiny ass boots, which looked like he had never gotten mud on them ever.”) Normally, I view that kind of just-folks attitude as an abdication of one’s responsibility to do one’s best. In this case, however, I think it works. The author has a genuine voice and rhythm. In tone, this is closer to the amusing letters I receive every year in an old friend’s Christmas cards than to literature. But it succeeds in telling his story, which he says is all he wanted to do.

Now, if he had been in the critique group where my own memoir was taken apart and put back together, he would surely have been urged to make numerous changes. Especially, he would have been told to try for more introspection (as opposed to rants). But the result would not have been this book. And again, this book works, for me.

Stephen Gallup is the author of a memoir, What About the Boy: A Father’s Pledge to His Disabled Son. He has an eclectic interest in books and authors, and reviews books as part of his passion for the written word. He blogs at fatherspledge.