Of vital interest to many kinds of readers, particularly those who share the author’s view that we are fighting a war that...
Want al-Qaeda to win? Then let the Pentagon handle the fight against that Islamist faction, which just won’t go away.
Scheuer (Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq, 2008, etc.), former chief of the CIA unit charged with tracking al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden, writes that the Western powers have “failed miserably in every conceivable way” in containing the terrorist group and eliminating the threat it poses. Instead, its growth appears constant, while the United States, he argues, “remains largely undefended.” Indeed, he writes, the American-led handling of the fight seems almost calculated to ensure Islamist victory, inasmuch as it helps accomplish the aims of bleeding our treasury, stretching our military to the breaking point and isolating us by destroying former alliances with other powers. The U.S. government has known of bin Laden’s commitment to destroy the West and kill Westerners, and particularly Americans, since 1996, but we have come no closer to accepting that the man is serious; our understanding of him and his cause barely moves beyond caricature. Scheuer examines the various “narratives” that have been constructed and finds them wanting in the face of known realities. One, apparently favored by the Saudi government in an effort to distance itself from bin Laden, born of an influential Saudi family, was that he was a wastrel and the son of a “Syrian-born outsider,” charges that are laughably untrue. Another, advanced by Victor Hanson Davis and other neoconservatives, throws around words like “Islamofascist” and turns a deaf ear to anything the Islamists have to say about their situation, which may turn up a legitimate complaint or two. Rightist media commentators in particular, writes Scheuer, are useless but influential—“they offer politicians an easy way out.” The author paints a careful portrait of his subjects and notes the ideological disagreements that divide elements of the Islamist movement, offering a program by which to combat “a formidable enemy, one whom we have almost willfully misunderstood.”
Of vital interest to many kinds of readers, particularly those who share the author’s view that we are fighting a war that may soon reach our shores.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-19-973866-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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