A response titled Fast Delivery sits partway down the review column on this audiobook listing, and the whole body underneath it reads: Excellent book. Two words, five stars, and a headline about shipping. That is the shape of the written record behind Scars and Stripes, a memoir credited to Tim Kennedy and read aloud by Tim Kennedy, running fifteen hours, fifty-two minutes. The copy up top promises a Green Beret sniper, a UFC headliner, a bull tackled with bare hands, and a man who was thrown out of the police department, the fire department and an EMT job before he was finished failing.
Kennedy reading his own book is the most consequential fact in this record, and the description never acknowledges it. A memoir this loud lives or dies on whether you believe the person telling it, and when the author is also the reader, the claim and the performance arrive in the same breath. You cannot separate the swagger of the prose from the swagger of the delivery, because both come out of one throat. For anyone drawn to the material at all, that is a strong argument for the recording over the printed page. For anyone who finds a hard sell in its owner's voice exhausting, it is an equally strong argument in the opposite direction, and the recording gives you no relief from it.
What separates the copy here from standard military-memoir marketing is that the failure list is printed on the jacket. Dismissed from the police department. Dismissed as an EMT. Two women pregnant four days apart. Beaten up by his own Special Forces colleagues for, in the description's own phrase, being a selfish asshole. Publishers do not usually lead with that inventory. Patrick Murphy, described in the copy as a veteran and a former United States Under Secretary of the Army, supplies the blurb, and even the blurb concedes heartbreaking failures before it reaches the incredible success on the other side. It is an unusual opening move, and it sets the terms for everything that follows: a book about being wrong in public, told by a man with a professional interest in never looking wrong.
Slow Word of Mouth Across Nearly Four Years
Taken purely as material, the range is real. Hunting poachers and human traffickers, jumping out of airplanes, diving to the depths of the ocean, headlining in the UFC cage and hunting the Taliban are not the standard contents of a single life, and the description strings them together without apology. Eric S, who came back for a second pass through the book, picks out humor, transparency and captivating stories as the reasons, which is a fair account of what the page is selling. Kennedy has an obvious appetite for the anecdote, and a runtime this long gives that appetite room to run with nobody trimming it back.
The recording arrived in June 2022, and the written responses did not arrive with it. The oldest one on the page is dated June 2024, two years after release. Three more landed within seven weeks of each other at the end of 2025, and the most recent, from Jay Bernal in March 2026, runs to five words: very entertaining book, much respect. Bob's is shorter still. Whatever traction this memoir has found, it found slowly and by word of mouth across nearly four years, which is usually a better sign than a launch-week pile-on, even when the individual endorsements are this thin. Not a single visible grade falls below five, which says as much about who bothers to write as it does about the book.
The 4.8 Badge Sits Above Three Ratings
Vociferoususer8 awarded five stars and titled the entry Based on a true story, with the trailing dots doing a great deal of work. The body underneath: this all definitely happened in the same way I definitely don't have a substance abuse problem. Read it once and it scans as praise. Read it again and it is a listener saying the memoir has been buffed, filed under the maximum grade, which is either a joke about the star system or a joke about the book. Nobody else here raises the question, and a self-narrated memoir hands you no second voice to check the account against.
The badge deserves a second look too. It reads 4.8, and the counter beneath it says three ratings. No combination of three whole-star votes produces 4.8 under any rounding rule you care to apply, so the number on the front of this listing is not the number the visible votes make. Meanwhile five written responses are visible, each carrying its own grade, and every one of those grades is a five. The counter is smaller than the crowd, and every grade a reader can actually see sits above the average being advertised.
Structurally, the book is a chain of set pieces, and the description sells it exactly that way: a bull, an airplane, the ocean floor, a cage, a hunt. Brent McNamara's entry calls the life a never-ending rollercoaster and warns you will need a seatbelt just to keep up. That works as entertainment. It works less well as an argument, and the jacket does make an argument, that failure is the first step toward unearthing the strongest version of yourself. Not one reviewer engages with that claim. They came for the bull.
The Only Voice in the Room Is His Own
Listeners who want a military memoir with the sanded edges left on will get precisely that. The failure inventory is the point, not a confession bolted onto a highlight reel, and hearing it delivered by the person who lived it gives the ugly stretches a weight the printed page would flatten. Regular readers of the military and war shelf who have tired of the reverent version are the natural audience, along with anyone working through a run of professional wreckage of their own, which is what the closing argument is built for. Just under sixteen hours is a genuine commitment, though the material rarely sits still long enough to drag.
Anyone who needs a memoir to be checkable should think hard first. Vociferoususer8 planted a doubt the recording cannot answer, because the only voice in the room belongs to the man being described, and no editor, co-writer or opposing account appears anywhere in the credits. The same warning applies to listeners who find braggadocio wearing at any length, since this runs to fifteen hours of it in the original voice. Skip it if you want the reckoning and not the ride.
In Brief
- Performance: Kennedy reads the memoir himself, which welds the swagger of the prose to the swagger of the delivery and leaves no second voice to check the account against.
- What it covers: Military service and combat, spectacular professional failure, recklessness as a habit, self-mythology.
- Feel: Loud, restless, unrepentant.
- Our call: A genuinely wild life told at full volume by the man who lived it, worth hearing with one reviewer's doubt about the polish kept in mind.
