A dark triumph—a meticulous geopolitical narrative and gripping tale of an American son lost to evil.
Shocking page-turner about Liberian dictator Charles Taylor’s American-born son, Chucky, the first U.S citizen to be federally prosecuted for torture.
Journalist Dwyer’s debut impresses as both old-fashioned immersive journalism and a grisly narrative using the Taylors’ rise and fall as an unforgiving lens through which to view recent West African history. Charles Taylor’s transformation from a leftist bureaucrat to a destructive warlord was one of the persistent political nightmares of the 1990s, but few knew at the time that he’d recruited his estranged teenage son. “Liberia,” writes the author, “presented to Chucky the possibility that he was heir to something larger.” Chucky had already shown attraction to “gangster” culture during his suburban Florida adolescence. Immersion in his father's court led him to evince sociopathic tendencies, and he was once tasked with developing a new paramilitary force, the Anti-Terrorist Unit. Initially, his depredations were merely urban legend against the larger backdrop of his father's cynical promotion of proxy wars. Once Taylor was elected president, Dwyer writes, “[h]e could not be called a criminal, because he had legalized all the rackets.” Yet things fell apart for Taylor in 2003, when he was both deposed by rebels and indicted by the U.N.’s Special Court for Sierra Leone. Chucky fled to Trinidad, but after two years, he attempted to re-enter the U.S. and was immediately arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. “Prosecuting torture was complicated,” writes the author. “It had simply never happened.” Yet the government assembled a damning case against Chucky, eliciting testimony from several torture victims, resulting in a 97-year sentence. Dwyer deftly captures both the larger implications of Taylor’s reign and the human-scaled horror of his son’s descent: "Chucky's story had been improbable and at times surreal, but its brutality was real.”
A dark triumph—a meticulous geopolitical narrative and gripping tale of an American son lost to evil.Pub Date: April 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-27348-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
