Reuters journalist Follain relates the life, crimes, and capture of the world’s best-known terrorist. Yet the Jackal eludes him, refusing to open his mind and motivation to the author. —Carlos the Jackal— was born in Venezuela to an affluent family whose father was a committed Marxist. He went on to be educated in London and Paris, and then in Moscow. His career as a terrorist began in Moscow when he made contact with the radical organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. On behalf of the Popular Front, Carlos carried out a series of bombings and assassinations, culminating in the kidnapping of 11 OPEC oil ministers in Vienna in 1975. After being expelled from the Popular Front for insubordination, Carlos became more or less a freelance revolutionary. He established a small army of followers that killed 24 people and wounded another 257. He was finally captured in 1994 by French authorities in Sudan and is serving a life sentence in France. That Carlos was able to elude capture for 20 years had to do, explains the author, both with the willingness of certain nations, particularly Libya, to shelter him and fund his activities, and with the inept attempts by Western security services to capture him. Indeed, the book is at its best when discussing these topics, but Carlos himself remains an enigmatic figure. Overweight and something of a dandy, he does not fit the mold of hardened terrorist. Despite his Marxist background, he seems anything but doctrinaire, having little to say on his political motivations. Undisciplined and aloof, he was hardly a tool for the Soviet Union. But despite Follain’s having a limited correspondence with Carlos, the Jackal refused to reveal himself and his motives, and even after efforts to interview those who knew him firsthand, Carlos remains a shadowy figure. A good factual account that fails to delve deeper into the enigma that was Carlos the Jackal. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55970-466-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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 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
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