A harrowing survival story.
An American journalist’s account of 44 days in a Taliban prison.
Van Dyk, a freelancer for CBS News and the New York Times, wrote years ago about his travels with the mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan (In Afghanistan: An American Odyssey, 1983). In 2008, he began a dangerous trip into Pakistani tribal areas occupied by the Taliban, hoping to chronicle life along the rugged Afghan/Pakistani border, a center of Taliban and al-Qaeda activity. Working on his own, Van Dyk disguised himself as a pious Muslim and a member of the Pashtun tribe prevalent in the region. He had just entered Pakistan when a group of Taliban kidnapped him and his Afghan guides. The author’s memoir reveals his constant fear and uncertainty during weeks of captivity in a Taliban safe house. When Van Dyk admitted he was an American, his captors treated him hospitably—as dictated by their tribal code—but nonetheless badgered and toyed with him psychologically, convinced he was a spy. Between interrogations, his jailers described differing plans. They would negotiate an exchange of Van Dyk for three inmates at Guantánamo; they would free him for a ransom of $1.5 million, or $1 million, or some amount, to be raised by his family and friends. At the same time, they stressed that preparing for Paradise was all that mattered, and insisted that he draw closer to Islam through prayer and reading. With the occasional Predator unmanned aircraft passing overhead, he talked with his captors about the role of women in Islam, the training of suicide bombers, and other relevant topics; studied the Pashtun language; fantasized about escaping; and slept more and more. Van Dyk’s staccato style keeps the narrative moving. Finally, he was taken back into Afghanistan and freed, the Taliban having presumably received a $200,000 ransom. “We will be watching you,” they warned. Later, at a U.S. military base, looking like a Taliban member with his long beard, Van Dyk found that soldiers were wary of him. He says he still did not know who was responsible for his kidnapping, whether a ransom was actually paid and, if so, by whom.
A harrowing survival story.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8827-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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