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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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