Fascinating reading from an expert.
A best-selling author and former CIA operative chronicles his experiences as an assassin while offering chilling insight into the fine art of political murder.
When FBI agents told CNN national security affairs analyst Baer (The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower, 2008, etc.) he was under investigation for the attempted murder of Saddam Hussein, he was bewildered. The CIA had indeed charged him with terminating Hussein, but now his country was turning against him for trying to do his job. With dry wit and intelligence, the author reviews his long career as a sometime-assassin (who ultimately never killed his targets) and provides running commentary about the do's and don’ts of political murder. He draws on his more than 25 years of experience as a CIA operative as well as the long, bloody history of assassination itself, titling each of the chapters after what he calls the 21 “laws” of killing powerful leaders. At the heart of the labyrinthine story are the author’s experiences with a man he calls Hajj Radwan, who had “truly mastered that eternal intimate dance between politics and murder.” Feared throughout the Middle East but especially in Lebanon, Radwan—who Baer speculates may have helped mastermind the 1988 downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland—worked with speed, secrecy, surprise and intimate knowledge of his victims. Perhaps even more importantly, he channeled his brutality on individuals rather than groups to “obtain well-defined and valid military objectives.” Baer contrasts Radwan’s tactics to the impersonal drone strikes—which often miss their marks, kill the innocent and produce more violence—currently employed by the United States. In the end, it is the skilled assassin, rather than the American technocrat, who doesn’t understand “the murky stew of clans and tribes that govern the ragged edges of the world,” that stands the better chance of eliminating evil.
Fascinating reading from an expert.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0399168574
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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