Or, “How Bill and Ted’s Self-Indulgent Adventure Became William and Theodore’s Moving Memoir.”
“Or,” as the subtitle puts it, “the True Story of Two Friends Who Gave Up Their Valuable Franchise Selling YANKEES SUCK T-Shirts at Fenway to Find Meaning and Adventure in Iraq, Where They Became Employed by the Occupation in Jobs for Which They Lacked Qualification and Witnessed Much That Amazed and Disturbed Them.”
Two feckless BoSox fanatics and first-time authors travel to Baghdad, where they manage to find some feck and do some good. They don’t begin as characters many readers will like. (For simplicity’s sake, LeMoine narrates their memoir.) When they decided to go to Iraq in October 2003, prompted by a heartbreaking-for-Boston World Series, they were young and dumb, full of early-20s certainty that they would never die and that just about everyone else was an idiot. But amid ruin and chaos in one of the most dangerous places on earth, they discovered that they liked to help the helpless, they realized their frailty, they . . . well, matured (sort of). The authors are certainly unafraid to admit their weaknesses, characterizing their 2003 selves as stupid, ignorant and gullible. What they did was indeed jaw-dropping in its chutzpah. In Jordan, they boarded a creaking bus to Baghdad, where they weaseled their way into working for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Soon, they were operating a charity they named HAND (Humanitarian Aid Network of Distribution) by day and downing drugs—alcohol and valium were their preferred downers—by night. Each day they drove out of the Green Zone (the high-security safety area) into what they called the Red Zone, where they distributed boxes of used clothing to swarms of children. They figured out how to circumvent or manipulate the military presence, how to communicate with Iraqis, where to find the best tobacco and the most drunken parties. When the U.S. shut down some opposition media, sectarian violence began to intensify, especially after the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted. In Jordan, the authors got in some scuffles, and the U.S. military cut them loose. Back home, they heard about the violent deaths of two friends in Baghdad. Some of the war-zone madness is reminiscent of Catch-22; some of the sorrow and tragedy is too.
Or, “How Bill and Ted’s Self-Indulgent Adventure Became William and Theodore’s Moving Memoir.”Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-59420-091-2
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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