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THE GIRL FROM KATHMANDU

Name: THE GIRL FROM KATHMANDU
Author: Cam Simpson
ISBN: 978-0-06-244971-9

TWELVE DEAD MEN AND A WOMAN'S QUEST FOR JUSTICE

by Cam Simpson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 17, 2018

A powerful work of investigative journalism, one that speaks volumes about the business of war and of human slavery alike.

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How war profiteering in the Middle East tore apart a village in the Himalayan foothills.

In 2004, writes London-based Businessweek senior international correspondent Simpson, not long after the U.S. invaded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a recruiter came calling in Kathmandu, ostensibly looking for workers at a luxury hotel in Jordan. In fact, those who answered the call were placed in the hands of people such as a former dry cleaner who ran a so-called body shop in Amman: “If you needed the ‘bodies’ of menial laborers, you went to Ali al-Nadi.” So it was that American military contractors in Iraq found their way to al-Nadi’s door to fill their ranks, and a dozen men from that Nepali village found themselves on the way to enriching everyone but themselves—but briefly, for on their way to the contractor’s camp within a vast U.S. air base, they were kidnapped by Islamist militants who declared the Nepalis “infidels” inasmuch as they were working in the service of the “Crusaders.” The Nepalis were executed, leaving it to their survivors to wonder how they had ended up in an American war zone in the first place. The answer, untangled by Kamala Magar, the widow of one of the Nepalis—whom the author interviewed numerous times in 2005, 2013, 2014, and 2016—came to implicate the largest American military contractor in Iraq in a sordid chain of human trafficking. Of course, the contractor continually denied the allegations throughout a long process of legal discovery, parts of which went all the way to the Supreme Court. Suffice it to say that, given the choice of ruling in favor of an utterly commendable Nepali widow of questionable legal standing but with an unflagging commitment to justice or a multibillion-dollar corporation with unlimited legal funds, the courts did not often honor the ideals of the law.

A powerful work of investigative journalism, one that speaks volumes about the business of war and of human slavery alike.

Pub Date: April 17, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-06-244971-9

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)