A harrowing, inspiring true story of a woman caught in a cesspool of corruption who refused to become dirty herself.
The frightening odyssey of a business executive who went to work in Afghanistan and ended up fighting a personal war against corruption.
Afghanistan is a land of “horror and beauty,” Greene writes in her debut memoir about her three-year sojourn in the war-ravaged nation. When the Australian native landed in Kabul in 2007 at age 37, she yearned for adventure, so she took a job as a general manager for a company providing supplies to defense organizations. Her naïve enthusiasm quickly gave way to the brutal realities of working in Afghanistan: suicide bombings, rocket attacks, widespread criminality and rampant corruption. Shortly after starting her job, Greene suspected that someone within the company was selling alcohol illegally on the black market; worse still, she found out that she had been set up as the scapegoat. Due to Afghanistan’s perfidious legal system, not only was Greene’s career at risk, but also her freedom—and possibly her life. As a result, she faced a soul-torturing dilemma—look the other way or uncover the truth—and she chose to fight back. This tautly written book is filled with mind-twisting intrigue as Greene recounts how she secretly gathered evidence to expose the conspiracy. Her story contains all the suspense of a mystery novel, but readers may find it all the more unnerving since it happened to a real-life, honest person. Readers will be forced to ask themselves: What would I do? The author’s courageous actions led to a purge in the company, but being a whistle-blower came at a heavy price. Even after the company took corrective action, Greene feared retaliation from angry bootleggers, as the alcohol trade in Afghanistan is similar to that in America during Prohibition—a treacherous world with people willing to do anything to control a lucrative market. Greene, in this fine memoir, shows that her keen sense of intuition and unwavering belief in what she thought was right proved to be her greatest survival tools.
A harrowing, inspiring true story of a woman caught in a cesspool of corruption who refused to become dirty herself.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491709306
Page Count: 270
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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