Superior reporting.
Greenberg (Law and Security/New York Univ. School of Law; co-editor: The Enemy Combatant Papers, 2008, etc.) reconstructs the early history of the notorious detention camp, before it became a shameful symbol of America’s War on Terror.
Sufficiently secure and located within U.S.-controlled territory, the naval base at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay emerged as the Pentagon’s “irresistible choice,” the “least worst place” to house prisoners from the war in Afghanistan. From the beginning, though, as the author persuasively argues, the mission suffered from an appalling lack of clarity. Where neither American nor international law clearly applied, the mission’s task force strenuously attempted to erect a humane detention regime, notwithstanding hazy directives from Donald Rumsfeld and Bush administration lawyers that left the detainees in a kind of “lawless limbo.” Greenberg reports this story largely through interviews with men like Col. Manuel Supervielle, who on his own initiative invited the International Committee of the Red Cross to Gitmo; Navy chaplain Abuhena Saifulislam, who bridged the gulf between the Muslim prisoners and the troops (and for his efforts was suspected by both); Naval Capt. Robert Buehn, who willingly subordinated his authority to help ensure a successful mission; and Marine Col. Michael Lehnert, who insisted on fair and legal treatment of the detainees. Greenberg’s account of Lehnert’s supervision of the young men he commanded, his deft handling of the media and the constant flow of visitors to “Camp X-Ray,” his response to public-relations disasters, his willingness to understand and address the grievances of the detainees, his effort to establish order, stability and humane protocols—later upset by the Pentagon’s interrogation agenda and embodied by his successor Army Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey—all make for painful speculation about how Gitmo’s slide into infamy might have been averted.
Superior reporting.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-19-537188-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
In her 15th book, hooks continues the memoir she began in Bone Black (1996). The little southern black girl who dreamed of being a writer from the age of ten is now a young woman entering Stanford University, away from home, from the South and Jim Crow laws, for the first time in her life. At 19 she takes a lover, Mack, an older black intellectual and poet, and begins work on the book that, 11 years later, would be her first published work, Ain't I a Woman? The relationship with Mack is at the center of this book, which is otherwise a review of all of hooks's usual concerns—race, gender, sexuality and desire, money and its uses and abuses, aesthetics, poetry. Her affair with Mack is turbulent, with an occasional undercurrent of violence that hearkens back to the relationship between her mother and father delineated in the previous book. hooks eschews conventional chronological structure to tell the story of her young adulthood and coming of age as a writer. Instead, she repeatedly moves back and forth in time, in chapters that are often organized thematically, shifting from third-person reflections on her young self to first-person recollections that move uneasily between past and present tenses. The result is an ungainly and repetitive hodgepodge of tones that's most effective when it's most conventional. At its best, the book contains flashes of insight that serve as a vivid reminder of how astute and downright brilliant a social critic and thinker the author is (as in a passing observation about the corrosive effects of ``quiet drinking'' in a family). But too much of this volume is either self-congratulatory gush (no author should write about how ``daring and difficult'' the book at hand is), or painfully misjudged efforts at poetic effect. Only a writer as good and determinedly idiosyncratic as hooks could have produced a book as misguided as this.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-4146-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
IN THE NEWS
These probing interviews with German-Jewish survivors of Nazi Germany, most of them current or former residents of Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood, will bring readers as close as memory can to the life in extremis led by Jews in Germany between 1933 and 1945. In 1986, Manfred Kirchheimer (Film/School of Visual Arts), himself a child of Washington Heights, wrote and produced a documentary film called We Were So Beloved, about the history and present circumstances of the community that raised him. The original interviews, much condensed for the film, are here reproduced in fuller form, edited and annotated by the filmmaker's wife. To the original interviews Kirchheimer adds more recent ones with current residents of his birthplace, Saarbrucken, Germany, including both Jewish returnees to Germany and non-Jewish Germans. In the kaleidoscope of memories that results, the harsh distinctions the Holocaust calls up between innocence and guilt, oppressor and victim, native and foreign, begin to blur; the authors imply that in the moral chaos of the times remembered here, and in the opinions and attitudes of those who remember, stark oppositions break down. One interviewee recalls his German education with fondness; another remembers kindnesses from German police and soldiers; others note tensions within the Jewish refugee community, between those from eastern and western Europe; still others feel accused by, even as they verge on accusing, those who lacked the stamina or resources to escape. The raw material of the interviews cries out for a grandly reconciling interpretation, which the authors wisely confine to a brief foreword by Steven Lowenstein of the University of Judaism and an afterword by Dan Bar-On of Ben Israel's Gurion University of the Negev. The largely uninterpreted data of the interviews effectively re-creates for readers the feelings of fragmentation and loss of bearings the interviewees knew firsthand. (34 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 18, 1997
ISBN: 0-8229-3997-5
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Univ. of Pittsburgh
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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