Excellent reportage—highly recommended for would-be journalists as well as those interested in geopolitics.
Eye-opening look at the drug war in Colombia, which involves lots of American troops and money.
Canadian journalist Leech (Political Science/Cape Breton Univ.; Crude Interventions: The United States, Oil, and the New World (Dis)Order, 2006, etc.) has been working the drug-war beat since 2000, and he takes the “war” part of the description seriously, investigating the little-visited corners of Colombia where few gringo reporters dare wander. The framework of this narrative is an 11-hour period that Leech spent in captivity after venturing in search of a story into a drug-producing district that is contiguous with La Macarena National Park, and that the government had just sprayed with particularly harmful pesticides, even though the park contains many civilians and villages. “The story is important,” he writes, “because the fumigations mark an escalation in the war on drugs, since it is the first time the Colombian government has succumbed to pressure from the Bush administration to spray coca crops cultivated in one of the country’s biologically diverse national parks.” Entering on the heels of a devastating spraying, Leech was thought to be a spy or narc. Fortunately, his time in captivity was less than harrowing, even if it had its rough moments. His imprisonment affords him a frame by which to hang a larger story of how the drug war is conducted (corruptly, of course), how it relates to the encompassing war between the government in the city and Marxist guerrillas on the outskirts, and how the production of coca articulates with the local economy—indeed, keeping many of those country people from starving. Leech writes critically of those in power but admiringly of ordinary Colombians, whom he depicts as generous to a fault, suffering in a war that the United States is sure to lose. The author also looks at how the game of foreign correspondence is played, often in the shadows, often working with spies and counterspies.
Excellent reportage—highly recommended for would-be journalists as well as those interested in geopolitics.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6145-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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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