Eat the Apple: A Memoir

By Matt Young

A daring and remarkable memoir which explores the devastating consequences of war on one impressionable young soldier

'Matt Young has written the Iliad of the Iraq War ... This book will strengthen your heart and soul' Tim Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

'Inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining' New York Times

Matt Young joined the Marine Corps aged eighteen, after a drunken night that culminated in him crashing his car into a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases of California. Young survived training and then three deployments to Iraq as an infantryman.

Eat the Apple is the response to those years. Visceral, ironic, self-lacerating and ultimately redemptive, Young's story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the vulnerability of those on the front lines and the motivations that drove a young man to a life at war.

Inventive and unputdownable, Eat the Apple is a powerful coming-of-age story about the devastating consequences of war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781408888261

Matt Young

Matt Young is an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, Business in Vancouver and Caldwell Partners Canadian Top 40 Under 40 business award winner. This serial entrepreneur graduated with a Kinesiology Degree from the University of British Columbia and started his first start-up company, a boutique health & fitness business: Innovative Fitness. Matt’s ability to distill complex constructs into bite-sized pieces that can be understood & activated by those delivering the service and the consumer has made him a sought-after business consultant. Matt has worked with numerous small and medium-sized businesses ranging from Deloitte to Velofix to Habitat for Humanity around creating solid foundations upon which future success can be built. He supports a variety of for-profit and not for profit organizations in the health, wellness, and sport sector at the local, national and international levels, including Alberta Physical Literacy Alliance, Norwegian Sport Federation, and more. Matt is the Founder of the Quality Coaching Collective www.qcoachingcollective.com and the Quality Sport Hub www.qualitysporthub.com. He has published numerous articles for magazines and journals, has authored and published seven books and with the support of his team, raised over $6.1 million dollars and counting for community charity. Matt is the Co-Founder of the Just Go Play Podcast (https://www.justgoplay.ca/).

Reviews for Eat the Apple

[susan.macura · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an interesting look at what it means to be a soldier today by a man who joined the Marines and served three tours in Iraq. It is an honest look at what serving really looks like as well as what our soldiers actually do and think while fighting for our country. It was an eye opening look but not in an expected way as the author describes a great deal of time spent doing nothing of value - watching TV, smoking, drinking, masturbating and shooting stray dogs. From reading many other versions of life at war, I have read tales that differed a great deal from this one, but the honesty was definitely here. Fortunately, our author also describes how he changed and grew from these experiences, making this a valuable resource for anyone thinking of serving.

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Four years as a Marine with three deployments to Iraq are distilled into this spiky string of shrapnel, which feels yanked from the author's psyche.