Dramatic and impressive, calling into question the voyeuristic war reporting of media conglomerates.
Well-executed, troubling account of a foreign correspondent’s addiction to combat zones.
Canadian-born Stewart, currently a fellow at Stanford, begins with a chilling portrait of his January 1999 encounter with a rebel in Freetown, Sierra Leone, who machine-gunned a government convoy, killing Stewart’s Associated Press colleague Myles Tierney and leaving Stewart with a bullet lodged in his brain. He then backtracks, describing his formative years as a journalist. After a dull start at the Toronto Star, he traveled to Asia for a more exciting beat with the Hong Kong Standard and UPI. He portrays an environment suited to hungry young reporters; by 27, he was UPI’s New Delhi bureau chief. His initial experiences in war zones—Indian snipers fired on him in Kashmir; in Afghanistan, he was briefly detained as a possible spy—caused him to crave more action, which he found as AP’s West African bureau chief. Based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, he was shocked by the region’s absurd bureaucracies and desperate poverty: “On almost every street, I was swarmed by clusters of scurrying little urchins.” To Stewart’s credit, his experiences covering Africa’s forgotten yet brutal conflicts cause him to question the atavistic career-mindedness that seemingly motivates war journalists. He recalls horrific scenes of torture, rape, summary execution, warfare conducted by children, and terrorist maimings, yet he indicates that Western approaches to such stories have accomplished little regarding the depredations of strongmen like Nigeria’s Sani Abacha and groups like Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front, renowned for their cruelty. Following Stewart’s injury, his AP colleagues arranged his evacuation via Swiss air ambulance to London, where a top neurosurgeon gave him a 20% chance of survival. The final third of his memoir depicts his difficult return to health, portraying both the support offered by his family and friends and his personal disorientation and anguish regarding the death of his friend Myles.
Dramatic and impressive, calling into question the voyeuristic war reporting of media conglomerates.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-380-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
© Copyright 2023 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.
bookshelf
