Ballen admits that they cannot reveal the motivation of all Islamic radicals, but few readers will deny that they illuminate...
Those who still believe terrorists are mindless fanatics will find little evidence in these revealing, often touching interviews with six young Islamic men.
In despair when his lover was forced to marry another man, a young Arab enlisted in the Iraqi insurgency, found it tedious and returned home only to learn that she had run off to become a suicide bomber. She never returned. Another Saudi, an aimless dropout, galvanized by TV images of American guards humiliating Abu Ghraib prisoners (a priceless recruiting bonanza for terrorists), joined and became the first suicide bomber to survive his attack. Two subjects, one gay, both deeply religious, flirted with terrorism without signing up, but their stories cast a revealing light on an exotic, unfamiliar culture. Wildly cynical and boastful, a midlevel Pakistani terrorist drips contempt for America—by aiding Pakistan, we are financing and fighting terrorism simultaneously—but gives equal time to denouncing former comrades, Pakistani officers and even Taliban fighters and high officials for heartlessness, greed, corruption and an un-Islamic lack of humility. These stories clearly represent the cream of more than 100 interviews.
Ballen admits that they cannot reveal the motivation of all Islamic radicals, but few readers will deny that they illuminate the frustrations of young Islamic men living in repressive societies, alternatively fascinated and horrified by America.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0921-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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 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
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