Though the author is occasionally overzealous in her attempts to wed the political and historical with the personal and...
A lucid memoir of life and travel in the war-torn Middle East, in which the author explores the journalistic adage that “to write the story, you have to eat the meal.”
Former Christian Science Monitor Baghdad correspondent Ciezadlo traces the six years she spent as an American in the Middle East. The story begins with the author following her Lebanese-born husband to Baghdad in 2003, where the two began new lives as war correspondents. Through immersion in food and cooking, Ciezadlo grounded herself amid widespread instability while gaining special insight into a people forced to endure years of bloody conflict. For ordinary Iraqis, creating meals from handed-down recipes that recalled “the memory of other places, other worlds” brought them a comfort and freedom they could not find elsewhere. At the same time, Ciezadlo also discovered how food allowed her to transcend the lingering homesickness that came from “trying to straddle two different places at once.” When the situation for foreign journalists in Baghdad became too dangerous, the author and her husband relocated to the relative calm of Beirut, a city that had been rocked by civil war for nearly 20 years. The couple eventually settled into happy domesticity; for a brief moment, among her husband’s relatives and the bounty of delicious food, the Ciezadlo felt satisfyingly rooted. However, they soon found themselves caught in yet another war as Israel began a military campaign against Hezbollah, which included the bombardment of Beirut. A re-emergence of old hostilities between Shiite and Sunni Muslims soon followed, causing more unrest. Saddened by “the aftertaste of hate,” Ciezadlo realized that while “the war would never end,” internecine conflicts did not diminish the fact that “[h]ome was wherever you broke bread with people you loved.”
Though the author is occasionally overzealous in her attempts to wed the political and historical with the personal and domestic, this ambitious and multilayered book is as much a feast for the mind as for the heart.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8393-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
