A sturdy tale of terror and counterterror that speaks to events that are happening even now.
Fast-paced narrative account of events in the Middle East 35 years ago, the opening salvo in a war that continues to unfold.
Burton and Katz (co-authors: Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi, 2013) open at a climactic moment: the kidnapping, in March 1984, of the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Francis Buckley. His Hezbollah captors tortured him for months before finally killing him. The authors focus sharply on key players and actors in the murder, which was but one act in an orchestrated campaign that played out on a stage marked by chaos. By their account, U.S. policy in the region was not well-articulated, and Reagan administration officials were divided over whether and how to support Israel in its actions against neighboring Lebanon and Syria, the former of which had emerged as a center of Iranian activity in the Middle East, the latter as “the Soviet Union’s chief client in the Arab world.” Buckley’s abduction closely followed a bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, a second suicide bombing of a Marine Corps barracks, and other terrorist actions coordinated by Imad Mughniyeh, a senior Hezbollah officer who planned operations against the U.S. and Israel for decades before finally being killed by the CIA and Mossad. Mughniyeh, the authors make clear, was serving Iranian interests, and Iran’s activities in Lebanon amounted to an undeclared war against the U.S., “a rapid march of calculated measures defined by cold-blooded ruthlessness.” These matters have since been revisited many times over, most recently by the Trump administration’s resumption of sanctions against Iran, but they resound in haunting ways throughout these sometimes-redacted pages—for, after all, Buckley’s murder and the back-channel dealings that would soon become known as Iran-Contra are roughly contemporaneous events. As the authors suggest, it seems that only insiders sworn to secrecy knew “that the spies didn’t do enough to save William F. Buckley.”
A sturdy tale of terror and counterterror that speaks to events that are happening even now.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98746-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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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