by Joby Warrick ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 19, 2011
An alarming narrative, especially so because of its understated, never-shrill tone.
The story of how the Central Intelligence Agency continued its record of failure in the so-called war on terrorism, with fatal consequences.
In his debut, Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post intelligence reporter Warrick focuses on Dec. 30, 2009, when CIA officials, U.S. military personnel and Pakistani and Afghani operatives gathered at a well-protected base in Khost, Afghanistan, to meet a Jordanian pediatrician who had seemingly become a valued spy for the Americans inside Muslim terrorist networks. But as the book's title suggests, Humam Khalil al-Balawi, despite supposedly careful vetting by CIA and Pakistani experts, was actually on the side of the anti-American warriors willing to sacrifice their lives in order to kill Westerners. Once inside the base, Balawi ignited a bomb strapped to his chest, killing seven CIA personnel. Although the classified-information obstacles and polished lies of master spies make accurate reporting on such embarrassing fatalities extremely difficult, Warrick demonstrates the initiative that has marked his newspaper career to share details that are mostly attributed and seem credible. An able storyteller, Warrick provides enough background on each key character to make them come alive. With so much focus on Osama bin Laden since 9/11—especially the failures of presidents Bush and Obama to fulfill their vows that he will be captured—it is easy for readers to forget that many other faith-based operatives from al-Qaeda and related organizations know how to lure American personnel into death traps. Warrick demonstrates the skills of those operatives while quietly exposing the lack of wisdom continually demonstrated by American government and military officials.
An alarming narrative, especially so because of its understated, never-shrill tone.Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-53418-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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
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