A book of journeys at once personal and universal.
A literate travelogue through troubled lands where the clash of civilizations is resounding loudly—and ever louder.
British journalist Burke (Al-Qaeda, 2004) logged time in Iraq in the 1990s as a soldier in the cause of Kurdish liberation. The experience gave him a distaste for carrying a gun, but not for traveling through parts of the Muslim world where bullets fly. The often violent travel reports he collects here range from Thailand to Tajikistan to Gaza to Algeria. In the last, he writes, homegrown Islamists recently mounted a failed rebellion. Burke favors the middle ground, and in Algeria, the ordinary people occupying it brushed the fundamentalists and their revolt aside: “It was their eventual disgust for the militants that had ended it.” Just so, Burke, reporting from Iraq, expresses the hope that even though they are hard-pressed on all sides, ordinary Iraqis will find a way to quell extremism and eventually live in peace, even though peace there is quite obviously far away. Burke allows that when the American invasion loomed in 2002, he “felt it was the right war for the wrong reasons, and at totally the wrong time.” Sure that it would reveal truths about modern Islam, however, he packed his notebook and went to Iraq; his accounts from both sides of the battle lines are the best parts here. The U.S. Marines he depicts are as much scared kids as stone killers, while the Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire serve to support his view that there are many kinds of Islam, few capable of being distilled in black-and-white terms. Says one old man at the Battle of Najaf, for instance, when instructed that the Jews are the enemy: “There aren’t any Jews here and anyway a good, honest Jew is better than a bad Muslim.”
A book of journeys at once personal and universal.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-36622-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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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