The Making of a Navy SEAL

rilsaw - The Making Of A Navy SEAL - My story of surviving the toughest challenge and training the best By Brandon Webb. Do you want to follow what others think is an impossible dream? That is what Brandon does in this amazing auto-biography. He faces unbelievable odds from a young age. There are several settings, because he lived on a boat for some time and was in the military. Brandon Webb is the protagonist, the path to being a Navy SEAL - the antagonist - is in his way. One major conflict is trying not to get washed out -fail- SEAL training. Another is trying to redesign the SEAL sniper training course. The turning point is when he finds out the imperfections of the sniper course when he was training in it, and then fixes them as soon as possible. A cool thing that happened was that Brandon trained elite snipers such as Chris Kyle (American Sniper) and Marcus Luttrell (Lone Survivor). I thought this book was one of the greatest that I have read in a long time because this book has so much detail and it tells you what life in the military is like.

August 1, 2015

Gr 7-10-"A few weeks past my sixteenth birthday, my dad threw me off a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean." So begins a fast-paced autobiography of a young man who would eventually become a U.S. Navy SEAL. A product of a dysfunctional family (his parents had a difficult marriage, and his father was physically abusive), Webb tells his life's story. His parents kept their often-rambunctious son out of trouble by encouraging him to get involved with athletics. That came to an abrupt end when the boy was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter disease, which is caused by overtraining, resulting in a painful lump below the kneecap. Braces were put on his knees in order to give them a chance to grow properly. By age 13, Webb was working on a dive boat. A chance encounter with a group of SEALs who visited the boat turned his life around and gave him a new goal. The rest of the book is a description of the experiences he had on his way to successfully realizing that dream: he became a SEAL and even became an instructor for other SEALs in training. This engaging narrative is informative and will speak to teens. VERDICT A fine choice for memoir collections.-Eldon Younce, Anthony Public Library, KS

Copyright 2015 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2015
Grades 9-12 U.S. Navy SEAL Webb's memoir is timed well with the success of the recent movie American Sniperas head sniper instructor, Webb trained Chris Kyle. In economic prose, with the help of coauthor Mann, Webb details his journey from a high-energy kid forced to move from place to place in his formative years to an elite sniper. More than half the book is devoted to the journey, which is not surprising, considering the intensity that leads to such high attrition rate. Upon becoming a Navy SEAL, Webb is selected for sniper training and faces combat tours in Afghanistan, not long after 9/11. He goes on to redesign the sniper curriculum, to great success. Though at a few points the level of detail may get too specific for the average lay reader, overall, Webb's story makes for a breathless read for the many who will never encounter anything remotely as mentally and physically challenging as the endless training exercises to make it into the SEAL teams.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)