The snapshot format necessarily risks superficiality, but these images and dispatches from the numberless rooms of hell have...
An online reporter visits some of the world’s nastiest places, where wars rage and ordinary people with extraordinary courage suffer unspeakable pain and loss.
Freelancing for NBC News in 2004, Sites shot the controversial footage seen around the world of a Marine murdering a helpless wounded Iraqi in a mosque. That episode and its aftermath, followed by his coverage of the 2004 tsunami (he happened to be scuba diving in the most affected region), form a prologue to the main story. When NBC offered him a staff job on the condition that he get a haircut, shave his goatee and go to “correspondent ‘boot camp,’ ” Sites turned instead to Yahoo! News to develop his “Hot Zone” project: a website featuring footage, text and slide shows from the world’s most searing spots. From September 2005 to August 2006, he skimmed the globe, stopping for brief periods to interview locals; observe battles; visit hospitals, morgues and ruined neighborhoods; and, when madness threatened, to surf or kick around a soccer ball with some teenagers. On his itinerary: Mogadishu, the Congo, Uganda, Sudan, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Israel and just about every other place where people were killing one another for reasons ranging from religious differences to territorial disputes. Sites believes that a single individual’s story can often be the best way to make us see vast landscapes of brutality and suffering, and so he tells us about people who’ve lost limbs to land mines, entire families to a tsunami, a husband to errant shrapnel, a future to the insidious workings of Agent Orange. “War poses as combat, but is really collateral damage,” he writes. “The actual fighting between armed groups is a small and infrequent element, while the violence they radiate on civil society and themselves will last for generations.”
The snapshot format necessarily risks superficiality, but these images and dispatches from the numberless rooms of hell have an undeniable cumulative power.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-122875-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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 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.
