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
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
