Before her first trips as a fill-in correspondent in South Asia in 2001, current ProPublica reporter Barker had little...
A memoir of the five years the writer spent reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.
Before her first trips as a fill-in correspondent in South Asia in 2001, current ProPublica reporter Barker had little overseas experience. But her life changed in the aftermath of 9/11, when she presented herself to the Chicago Tribune as an ideal candidate for reporting work in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unmarried and childless, she was “expendable.” By the time Barker became the bureau chief of the Tribune’s Delhi office in 2004, she was a confirmed adrenaline junkie, always looking for her next “fix” of riots, bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and natural disasters. Of the half-dozen countries for which she was responsible, only Afghanistan gave her the “high” she craved. With its “jagged blue-and-purple mountains, and bearded men in pickup trucks stocked with guns and hate for the government,” the country seemed a hallucinatory version of her native Montana. Equally at home embedded with troops on the front lines or interviewing Taliban warlords and political elites like Hamid Karzai and Benazir Bhutto, Barker witnessed violence, death and governmental corruption on a daily basis. But unexpected absurdities, such as the attempts of an ex-prime minister of Pakistan to offer the writer choices—himself among them—for romantic “friends,” offered occasional comic relief. Her work—and a social life in Kabul that resembled a surreal cross “between a fraternity party and the Hotel California”—became a way she could escape from the relationship failures, which she chronicles with the same candor and edgy wit that characterize the rest of her bold, slightly chaotic narrative. Politically astute and clearly influenced by Hunter S. Thompson, Barker provides sharp commentary on the impotence of American foreign policy in South Asia after the victory against the Taliban. “We had no stick,” she writes. “Our carrots were limp after almost eight years of waggling around.”Pub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-53331-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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