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COMMANDER OF THE FAITHFUL

Name: COMMANDER OF THE FAITHFUL
Author: John W. Kiser
ISBN: 978-0-9798828-3-8

A STORY OF TRUE JIHAD

by John W. Kiser ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2008

Indifferently written and burdened by invented dialogue, but notable for illustrating that the meeting of civilizations need...

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Biography of a moderate Arab leader in an age of intransigence and empire building.

Freelance biographer and business writer Kiser (The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria, 2002, etc.) finds a meaty subject in early-19th-century Algeria, when French soldiers invaded the country, ostensibly to deliver it from Ottoman oppressors, only to find that the Algerians rather liked the Ottomans, “whose laissez-faire habits had left the tribes in relative freedom so long as they paid their taxes.” They did not like the liberty, equality, fraternity-spreading French, whom they ambushed in mountain passes and attacked in the city streets. The intellectual author of resistance was a jihadist emir named Abd el-Kader, a marabout (“a holy man or member of a religious brotherhood”) who kept much of the French army pinned down for several years until finally being captured. El-Kader played a gentleman’s game of war, accompanied by religious pronouncements meant for anyone with ears, along the ecumenical lines of, “No one is an infidel in all the ways relating to God.” The French emperor greeted El-Kader as a worthy foe, and arrangements were made to settle him in a grand castle within sight of the Pyrenees, even if some of the locals protested that he was a “monster of the desert.” Still, a prison is a prison, and El-Kader’s many friends in France eventually agitated to have him removed to Ottoman territory, where he became a respected governor and saved thousands of Christians from being killed in religious violence in Syria. As Kiser notes, he was so widely respected that the New York Times editorialized on his death that he was “one of the few great men of the century.”

Indifferently written and burdened by invented dialogue, but notable for illustrating that the meeting of civilizations need not always produce a clash.

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-9798828-3-8

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Monkfish

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)