A high-action, low-analysis memoir of a commendable life.
Adventures of a peripatetic human-rights activist committed to exposing the horrors of modern-day slavery and freeing its victims.
Cohen—whose past includes an addiction to street drugs and a business/creative partnership with Jane’s Addiction leader Perry Farrell—transformed himself into a dedicated activist in the early 1990s after his mother was diagnosed with cancer. He began studying Hebrew and working on Jubilee, a peace-through-music movement seeking to lower the debt of third-world countries and to free coerced workers. Journalist Buckley profiled Cohen in an award-winning 2007 article that appeared in LA Weekly. Here she aids him in recounting his escapades in Cambodia, Sudan, Ecuador, Myanmar, Israel and Iraq, among other countries. Cohen’s job, which he refers to as “night frighting,” was to pose as a sex-hungry tourist. He would visit a brothel, select a young girl from a lineup, go with her to her room, gain her confidence, tape an interview and take photos to document the visit. Using the information he gained, agencies made arrests, rescued the girls and placed them in protective custody. Cohen took great personal risks, sometimes getting caught in the crossfire of rival gangs, sometimes being forced to hide and flee the country. The graphic details of his nighttime activities contrast sharply with the quiet hotel scenes, where Cohen said prayers for his father and meditated on passages from the Book of Job. During part of his time abroad, the author was also responsible for the care of his terminally ill father back in California, a task that caused him deep distress and the details of which are disturbing. While Cohen tosses in some statistics and reports on the actions being taken by others, this is not an overview of sex trafficking or any other form of forced labor; it is a personal story of one man’s campaign to rescue its victims. An epilogue urges readers to get involved and provides links to various human-rights groups.
A high-action, low-analysis memoir of a commendable life.Pub Date: June 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4169-6117-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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