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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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