Relentlessly self-serving.
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda recounts eight years of frustration seeking justice for the victims of genocide and crimes against humanity.
From her post as Switzerland’s attorney general, Del Ponte reluctantly accepted a 1999 summons from Kofi Annan to become the UN’s chief prosecutor at The Hague’s war-crimes tribunal, the first such enterprise since Nuremberg. Assuming an office designed to operate independently of governments, she was soon head-butting what she called the muro di gomma (the wall of rubber)—pretended cooperation from diplomats, political leaders, police and military officials intent on thwarting her assignment. At times throughout this dense narrative Del Ponte appears clear-eyed about the difficulties of prosecuting violators of the law or customs of war from an office lacking the powers typically employed by courts in sovereign states: the ability to discover important evidence, recruit witnesses, arrest individuals, etc. At times she’s prepared to accept a certain amount of blame for her failings as an administrator and negotiator. Too frequently, though, she strikes the reader as wholly unsuited—because of her abrasiveness, her disposition to take quick offense, her missionary zeal—to the real-world limitations of her admittedly daunting task. This is most apparent in her determination to eschew mere victor’s justice in favor of prosecuting, midstrife, all sides in the Rwanda and Yugoslavian conflict. Not content going after the likes of Miloševic, Karadžic and Mladic, she’s genuinely disappointed to have been unable to bring charges against NATO for its possible misdeeds in the 1999 bombing campaign in Serbia. She is intolerant of anything short of complete cooperation and absolute justice, a conviction her admirers will find noble and her critics insufferable. Full of her worthy mission, she comes off as precisely the pampered bureaucrat—eager for distinction, jealous of her turf, protective of her legacy—she claims to loathe.
Relentlessly self-serving.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59051-302-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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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