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 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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