More than just a war story; a harrowing examination of the tolls of the world’s conflicts.
A small but crucial sampling of war reporting by one of the finest journalists of her generation.
Marie Colvin (1956–2012) was one hell of a reporter, right up to the point where she was killed by an IED while under intense shelling by the Syrian government. This collection only scratches the surface of nearly 20 years of war reporting for the Sunday Times, but it’s a remarkable portrait of the raw wounds of conflicts that burn on, even in times the Western world considers to be “peace.” The collection is sensibly divided into both chronological and geographical sections, and it spans the globe. If there was a hot spot in the world, Colvin seems to have gotten there, from the war in Libya to the genocides in Kosovo to the disproportionate response of Moscow to the Chechen uprisings. There are unusual interviews with figures like Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gadhafi, but one of Colvin’s many gifts was ferreting out the story of the common people suffering through unimaginable horrors—e.g., the girls raped as the result of systemized terror under Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe; the untrained, illiterate forces of the Afghani military expected to take over for the full force and fury of the American incursion. If journalists are expected to suffer for their stories, Colvin paid the full price for capturing these stories: Her nose was broken by a rock thrown by Palestinian demonstrators while she was posing as a Jewish settler; her eye was punctured by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade in Sri Lanka, an event that led to her iconic eye patch. In her 2001 acceptance speech for a humanitarian award for courage, she pondered whether the stories were worth the damage: “Simply: there’s no way to cover war properly without risk. Covering a war means going into places torn apart by chaos, destruction, death and pain, and trying to bear witness to that.”
More than just a war story; a harrowing examination of the tolls of the world’s conflicts.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-00-748796-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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