Pargeter’s cliché-ridden prose detracts from, but does not completely overwhelm, her account of the brutal Qadaffi regime.
A thorough but wooden examination of the making of Muammar Qaddafi.
Unlike Lindsey Hilsum in her on-the-ground journalistic account, Sandstorm (2012), Pargeter (The Muslim Brotherhood, 2010, etc.) maintains an academic distance with her workmanlike prose. The author takes a more historical approach, portraying the coup by the young Bedouin soldier in 1969 as the last in an unhappy series of power grabs over the sparsely populated, disunited, tribe-riddled Libya. Under the imperious Italians, the Libyans were treated merely as “shadows in their own land”; the country achieved independence in December 1951 only by the maneuverings of the victorious powers of World War II. “At the time of independence,” writes the author, “Libya was ranked the poorest nation in the world.” When the group of fervently nationalist officers finally seized power from the ineffectual King Idris in 1969, Qaddafi took the lead, insisting on a purity of purpose—despite the fact that he had no worldly experience or education to speak of, shocking other Arab leaders with his fulsome political naivety. What Pargeter calls the “shambolic atmosphere” around him grew to nightmarish proportions once Libya struck oil. It resulted in a bloated public sector, bureaucratic chaos based on his “hopelessly simplistic” utopian Green Book (which Pargeter has actually read and helpfully dissects), the formation of “curious alliances” (e.g., with terrorist organizations and the worst dictators of Africa once the Arab League shunned him), rampant nepotism, a whimsical Islamist doctrine, and the elimination of opposition parties, among other dictatorial prerogatives. Ultimately, readers will wonder why the populace waited so long to get rid of him.
Pargeter’s cliché-ridden prose detracts from, but does not completely overwhelm, her account of the brutal Qadaffi regime.Pub Date: July 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-13932-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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