An innocent abroad: New York Times reporter Feuer’s engaging memoir of a brief sojourn in Iraq.
Feuer dons the Gray Lady’s “This Reporter” persona to become the narrator known as “T.R.,” and though the result of referring to himself in the third person is at first a little strange, he never makes the mistake of taking himself too seriously. Quite the reverse, for the most part: our Candide first turns up in these pages as a cub reporter who, though lazy and unambitious, at least is honest. Thanks to the vetting of a brilliant editor, T.R./Feuer reluctantly finds himself on a short list of reporters to be allowed into Iraq, a cause for celebration for the career-minded; says one colleague, “You’re on the fucking list? Dude, that’s great! Beers in Baghdad!” Given that his last story had been a profile of a Bronx resident who had emerged as the largest packager of tours to Italy, Feuer finds himself mystified by the assignment, but he nonetheless stocks up on the requisite safari gear and reporter tech kit in the evident hope of at least looking something like a war correspondent. He finds no shortage of things to write about, and as he gradually sheds his naive affect, he turns in some memorable portraits: there are the boozy death-and-glory hounds in the press corps; a Jordanian woman who diligently makes time in a world of graft to catch up with Sex and the City DVDs; Iraqi civilians whose lives have been overturned by the invasion; and, especially, American combat troops whose own innocence seems at odds with a certain trigger-happiness. His self-portrait is memorable, too, as Feuer recounts how his “eyes were opened to the methods used to make the news. He hated thinking any thought that might inspire cynicism, and would hardly wish to bitch . . . still he was surprised.”
Of the war itself we catch only smoky, sand-blown glimpses. But Feuer’s first book helps us understand how the image of war is crafted, and for that alone it is welcome.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58243-327-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
Categories: HISTORY | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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