More historic chronicle than biographic exposé—will appeal mostly to academics and those with an intense interest in the...
The turbulent history of Afghanistan and its most powerful and influential army general through the eyes of an American historian.
Dubbing it one of his life’s greatest challenges, Williams (Afghanistan Declassified: A Guide to America’s Longest War, 2011), a former CIA tracker and Islamic history instructor, traveled extensively throughout central Asia to probe the region’s historic bounty and, moreover, to discover the intriguing man behind the Taliban’s demise, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, Uzbek commander of the Northern Alliance opposition. Williams easily appreciated an area uniquely accommodating of both modern Western and traditional Afghan customs. Undeterred by its characteristic sand, heat and whipping windstorms, he writes excitedly of the 2003 and 2005 visits to Mazar-i-Sharif, where Dostum’s imperial compound awaited him and where questions about the warlord’s refuted reputation as either a ruthless drug baron or a respected leader of the Afghan people could finally be answered. Somewhat unexpectedly, though with aplomb, Williams charts Dostum’s scrappy, “primitive” origins from army soldier to military warlord alongside the expansive history of Afghanistan, through Taliban fundamentalism, the assassination of military leader Ahmad Massoud, 9/11 and the play-by-play details of the warlord’s American-assisted victory. As expected, the politics of war figures heavily throughout the book, as does Williams’ version of Dostum’s crucial role in redefining the area under his refined regime. Still, while the minute details of Afghanistan’s vast history are mostly engaging, they absorb most of the book’s promising exclusive-with-a-warlord punch, leaving the author’s brief time interviewing Dostum and touring the grounds almost as an afterthought.
More historic chronicle than biographic exposé—will appeal mostly to academics and those with an intense interest in the collapse of the Taliban.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61374-800-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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