Witty, insightful, scathing, appalling and inspiring—a must-read book on the Iraq war.
A former Naval officer examines his time as a member of an energy task force in Baghdad.
Brownfield, a U.S. Naval Academy grad, began his service as a submarine officer. Highly idealistic, he resisted the compromises most new officers made—specifically, cheating on the exams required to certify his competence to run a nuclear reactor. Watching his captain run the sub aground, he learned to distrust the default assumption that maintaining authority is more important than being right. He was ready to leave the Navy for grad school at Yale when, in the aftermath of 9/11, he signed up for service in Iraq. His mission was to help coordinate military and civilian responses to the country’s energy shortages. He quickly found that most of his superiors were merely marking time, doing their best not to shake up the status quo. Brownfield’s major assignment was reading the text of PowerPoint presentations to commanding Gen. George Casey. None of his immediate team showed the least interest in doing anything to improve the ability of average Iraqis to get electricity. Their major contact in the local government received constant death threats, and the author’s superior, a fellow submariner, made empty promises but did nothing practical to help the man. Others were openly cynical in their reasons for being there or just collecting the higher pay for serving in a combat zone. Brownfield, still idealistic, tried to find ways to make a difference. He developed a method to transport heavy diesel engines to their intended destination, only to be blocked by a local official who saw no political advantage in letting them through. A plan to issue millions of compact fluorescent bulbs to Iraqis to save on energy costs was stalled until Gen. David Petraeus came on board—but even with his approval, it remains incomplete. Brownfield left Iraq convinced that energy independence, the professed goal, was in fact a false ideal; instead, he sees “sustainable interdependence” as the only mature approach to solving the world’s energy problems.
Witty, insightful, scathing, appalling and inspiring—a must-read book on the Iraq war.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27169-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
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