Pakistan, Musharraf insists, is doing what it can to contain Islamist terrorism. Time will tell, but his memoir sheds much...
The Pakistani leader recounts a life steered by “luck and destiny” and vigorously defends and promotes his nation to the world.
A turning point in Musharraf’s well-written memoir comes when he recalls one of many attempts to remove him from the scene. In 1999, former leader Nawaz Sharif engineered a bizarre coup that hinged on keeping Musharraf, then commander of the Pakistani military, from leading the army against him by preventing his plane from landing on Pakistani soil. Eventually landing with only a few minutes’ worth of fuel to spare, Musharraf borrowed a flak jacket, coordinated the arrest of the coup leaders and took control of a country that, he ruefully acknowledges, has not done its best to be a democracy. Clearly, by Musharraf’s account, he’s working to improve matters; he advocates religious freedom, gender equality and freedom of speech, and urges that if Pakistan is to move toward prosperity and international influence, it will “have to suppress extremism and intolerance and eradicate them from our society.” Such opinions have inspired several assassination attempts, and Musharraf’s efforts at destroying al-Qaeda strongholds within the country, which he describes in much detail, have earned him new enemies. Yet the now widely reported news in this memoir is another confrontation: Following 9/11, he writes, the American ambassador presented him with a list of demands that he found unacceptable, among them “blanket overflight and landing rights” that were, he believed, tantamount to a surrender of national sovereignty. Daring to stand up earned him what he describes as “the most undiplomatic statement ever made” on the part of U.S. deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who repeated his boss’s for-us-or-for-the-terrorists formula and warned that “if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age.”
Pakistan, Musharraf insists, is doing what it can to contain Islamist terrorism. Time will tell, but his memoir sheds much light on the politics and challenges of the region.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8344-9
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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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