A gimlet-eyed meditation on a troubled country’s progress toward political and legal reform.
A diplomat’s remembrance of his tenure in war-torn Afghanistan.
In the aftermath of the 2001 American invasion, Afghanistan has struggled to convert a national trauma into an opportunity for transformation. To that end, American diplomat Crowther traveled to its southern Uruzgan province in 2011 as part of a provincial reconstruction team. He was charged with the daunting task of building a legal system that upheld the principles of the country’s fledgling constitution. The challenges he faced were many and considerable. Of course security risks were omnipresent, and the author provides chilling accounts of the danger of suicide attacks. The creation of a new legal code required more than just the establishment of new institutions and agencies, so Crowther reflects insightfully on the problems that Afghan culture posed to reform. Laws in Afghanistan have historically been handled at the tribal level, and the seemingly infinite fissures between warring factions made the establishment of a single legal code extraordinarily difficult. Also, Crowther had to contend with the tug of war between rival religious sects, particularly the more modern Sunnis and the revanchist Salafists. The question of gender inequality recurs, and the author writes with credible clarity about the precarious predicament that women found themselves in. Ultimately, Crowther learned some hard lessons about what was necessary for judicial uniformity and national unity: “In the end, the diverse regions will remain autonomous, and whatever government holds power in Kabul, it will be based on a confederacy of self-interests and the art of the deal.” Although he often delves into complex policy issues, he largely avoids technical, wonkish language, but readers may tire of deciphering the book’s stream of bureaucratic initialisms. The personal and the political combine into a seamless whole as Crowther shifts quickly from his expert analysis of Afghanistan to visceral accounts of his particular experiences. Overall, this debut should satisfy readers searching for an empirically rigorous but breezily anecdotal account of one of the most tempestuous nations in the world. It includes a generous sprinkling of black-and-white photographs documenting the author’s travels, including portraits of some of the men and women who figure prominently in his account.
A gimlet-eyed meditation on a troubled country’s progress toward political and legal reform.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5049-6353-4
Page Count: 228
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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