Not as seasoned as Anne Garrels’s similarly structured Naked in Baghdad (2003), but with some good moments.
A tentative, slight memoir of a sojourn in hell.
Jackie Spinner had a decade’s experience as a Washington Post reporter when she snagged an assignment in Iraq, but by her account she was still green; one editor, she remembers, told her in so many words that she “wasn’t good enough to tackle a story that would require narrative writing.” Readers might be forgiven for thinking as much of the opening chapters, which focus without much depth on the usual helmet-and-rations stuff and offer self-important nostrums (“I went to Iraq because I am a journalist: we drive into hurricanes, not away from them”; “The key to good beat reporting—and I considered the Abu Ghraib story my beat—is to cull sources”). There is little crying, true, but also much complaining about such things as the absence of vegetarian refried beans and the unpleasantness of hearing mortars at all hours—an occupational hazard, one assumes, for anyone who ventures into a war zone. Alternately breezy and world-weary, the narrative gathers strength and speed when Spinner begins to take notice of the world beyond her laptop screen. Apparently generous by nature, she befriends a psychically damaged young Iraqi woman, one of Uday Hussein’s manifold rape victims, who later commits suicide at an American military base (or does she?). Spinner is quick to feed hungry GIs and to bake cookies for her colleagues, who have had to endure the ministrations of a former Saddam-regime chef who is lucky the dictator never ate her cooking. And she takes daring measures to cover the story, not quite fearlessly but bravely all the same. These make for the story’s strongest turns, complemented by her sister Jenny’s reflections on Jackie’s story as she received it in phone calls and emails—and, memorably, in one emotionally fraught visit.
Not as seasoned as Anne Garrels’s similarly structured Naked in Baghdad (2003), but with some good moments.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8853-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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 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
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