A competent enough account of battle, punctuated by useful lists of what to take along. (Power Bars are good. So are...
Of mullahs, mujaheddin and moolah: a spook’s-eye view of the recent fighting in Afghanistan.
Most professional soldiers are reluctant to talk about the things they’ve done and seen in the field, but CIA types these days seem happy to tell all. Agent Schroen takes pains to accentuate the positive—opening, for instance, with the happy assurance that a CIA review board called his book “the most detailed account of a CIA field operation told by an officer directly involved that has ever been cleared . . . for publication.” Among the details to which we’re treated: Schroen’s team’s communications officer was flatulent, but he kept the cables coming, and that’s the important thing. If you’re high enough up in the paramilitary food chain, you get what you ask for, including, in the case of the “Jawbreaker” crew, 200 pounds of Starbucks coffee and a Bible (“I never knew whether Chris actually read the Bible he had requested, but it was a thoughtful gesture for the CTC logistics officers to make the extra effort to purchase and ship it to him”). If you want to get things done in Afghanistan, you pay bribes: $50,000 a month for senior commanders back in the golden days of anti-Soviet intervention, rather more today (“In the forty days I was in the Panjshir Valley, I spent $5 million, the vast majority passed to our Afghan allies for their use”). And, by Schroen’s account, there’s nothing quite so thrilling to behold as a cavalry charge, even when the bad guys have machine guns. After all, the good guys have bunker-buster missiles, and it’s not so bad to behold flaming Taliban and al-Qaida troops breathing their last, either. And so on.
A competent enough account of battle, punctuated by useful lists of what to take along. (Power Bars are good. So are knives.) Schroen never quite gets around to explaining why Osama & Co. are still on the loose, but he does close by wondering whether, “given the total preoccupation with Iraq,” the Bush folks will forget about Afghanistan—and perhaps their quarry, too.Pub Date: May 31, 2005
ISBN: 0-89141-872-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Presidio/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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