A bleak, disturbing picture of a country of strategic importance to American foreign policy.
A memoir/political history of Pakistan’s famous feuding political dynasty, penned by a young family member whose father, grandfather, uncle and aunt all met violent deaths.
Afghan-born Pakistani poet and writer Bhutto begins with the career of her grandfather, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was assassinated in 1979. The focus of the book, however, is on the life and career of her father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, a Western-educated political exile determined to avenge the death of his father, and whose return to Pakistan in 1993 challenged the regime of his sister Benazir Bhutto, then prime minister. The author’s early memories of her aunt are tender, but over time her views altered sharply and she now places moral responsibility for her father’s death—he was shot by Pakistani police in 1996—on her aunt and Benazir’s husband, current Pakistan president Asif Zardari. To gather information and photographs, the author searched through family diaries and letters, official documents and newspaper reports, and interviewed old friends, family, acquaintances and political associates, not only in Pakistan but in Europe and across Asia. She includes excerpts from her grandfather’s and her father’s letters to their children, and a more-than-generous number of family photos, both formal and candid. If Bhutto is tough on certain family members, she is equally so on her country, “a nuclear-armed state that cannot run refrigerators,” and on its largest city, Karachi, “overcrowded, underdeveloped, and poor,” with a police force “perpetually violent and corrupt.” According to the author, the United States has long interfered in Pakistani politics, sending billions of dollars to support criminal regimes for its own political and economic advantage, and currently sending drones that kill innocent schoolchildren in the name of the fight against terrorists. Bhutto is sure she knows who the bad guys are, and she does not hesitate to name them. She provides vivid portraits of life in an extended upper-class family and of enduring bloody feuds, brutality and death, but fair-and-balanced reporting is not on offer in this highly personal account by a journalist on a mission.
A bleak, disturbing picture of a country of strategic importance to American foreign policy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56858-632-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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