Timely and compelling, Garcia provides a glimpse beyond the easy headlines.
A Midwest-based reporter recounts his sojourns to Afghanistan, the harsh realities on the ground and the personal connections he made.
Before he landed in Bagram Air Base in November 2001, the only thing Kansas City Star journalist Garcia knew about Afghanistan was that the U.S. government was committed to routing out the Taliban and that it served as the backdrop for Rambo III. During the course of six years and five tours in Afghanistan, as well as one in neighboring Pakistan, Garcia came to think of the region as a second home. Though fraught with corruption, poverty and marked cultural differences, it also provided a unique friendship. His main compatriot was Khalid, Garcia’s young Afghan driver and translator who he affectionately referred to as Bro. The two ventured through the heart of Kabul, as well as out into the unstable rural areas, trying to follow the often-complicated recovery effort. More often than not they encountered locals—hunger-stricken families, disillusioned shopkeepers, outcast war widows, resourceful beggar boys—who stood in sharp contrast to the messages of hope and stability the media and the government often touted. These stark and often heartbreaking moments, as well as the duo’s more frightful brushes with bombings, trigger-happy checkpoints and wandering gangs of bandits, make The Khaarijee—the Dari word for outsider—more than a simple memoir. It’s a first-person account of the messiness of war and the failings of good intentions, both of which serve as recurring themes throughout. By the end readers may feel the same affinity for the country that the author does, hoping that one day Afghanistan will fully recover from its violent past.
Timely and compelling, Garcia provides a glimpse beyond the easy headlines.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0057-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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