Delgado brings an intriguing perspective to a complicated situation, but these notes could use polishing.
A veteran who was honorably discharged as a conscientious objector lays out a case against the Iraq war.
After a peripatetic childhood as the son of an American diplomat in Thailand, Senegal and Egypt, the introverted and inherently contrarian Delgado moved with his parents to Florida. He attended college briefly, but dropped out to join the Army Reserves as a way of spiting the pseudo-intellectual elitism he found on campus. Waiting to be called to active duty, he finally cracked open some assigned reading on Buddhism and in one sitting decided, “I’ve been a Buddhist for a long time.” Deployed to Iraq, Delgado eventually concluded that a vegetarian Buddhist could not be a U.S. soldier. An impressive combination of research, relentlessness and steadfastness won him a conscientious-objector discharge. While the cynical or jingoistic may read self-justification into his account of the war, Delgado’s portrait of a morally unmoored military is peppered with anecdotes about anti-Muslim sentiment and casual violence against civilians that ring true. A lack of exposure to other cultures and languages renders American soldiers unable to recognize our shared humanity, he argues. Combined with a military culture that encourages viewing all Arabs as enemies and provides neither adequate supervision nor proper preparation, this blindness makes horrors like Abu Ghraib inevitable. Delgado’s points are effective. However, his inward-looking narrative only fitfully conveys a wider sense of the war. It’s also confusing: The author uneasily juxtaposes you-are-here action scenes with flashbacks of seeing monks in Thailand, memories of his girlfriend, explanations of Buddhist philosophy, descriptions of friends from the motor pool and a rough guide to filing conscientious objector paperwork.
Delgado brings an intriguing perspective to a complicated situation, but these notes could use polishing.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7270-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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