A timely, politically charged biography of Bishop Carlos X. Belo, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1996 for his efforts to end the oppression of the people of East Timor at the hands of the Indonesian military. Kohen, a former investigative reporter with NBC News, canonizes Belo for his struggle to minimize the human impact of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, but his saintly portrait of a great humanitarian rising to the call of the suffering masses seems less intriguing than his extremely acute political analysis of the ongoing crisis. Of particular interest is the involvement of the US throughout the 28-year history of the conflict. From Kissinger’s nod to the Suharto government when he declared that the US “understands Indonesia’s position,” on the eve of the invasion in 1975, to the deployment of American-made OV-10 Bronco counterguerrilla planes during the “70s, to the millions of dollars of questionable campaign contributions received by the Clinton administration, the Indonesian invasion has been facilitated by the US government. Not until the Santa Cruz cemetery massacre of 1991, captured live by the international media (more than 250 youngsters gunned down by Indonesian troops), did any serious international attention focus on the occupation. Noam Chomsky and others have written extensively about the failure of the Western media to cover human-rights violations in East Timor, and Kohen’s graphic description of youthful protestors being shot down with American-made M-16 rifles renders the reasons for such a news blackout quite clear’stories about “emerging markets” trump those about human-rights violations every time. The collapse of the Indonesian economy and the end of Suharto’s dictatorship have made that country increasingly dependent on the West. Kohen issues an important call for members of the financial First World to take advantage of their influence by bringing pressure on the Indonesian government to end its brutal policies in East Timor.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-19885-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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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