Mostly engrossing stories of travel interspersed with historical vignettes and the author’s private struggles to argue for a...
A collection of essays centered on the author’s experiences of encountering religious fanaticism among the Taliban in Afghanistan and Mormons in Utah.
In November 2001, journalist and NPR radio producer Carrier (Journalism/Utah Valley Univ.; Running After Antelope, 2001) traveled to Afghanistan to report on the Taliban and the diverse factions and ethnicities vying for power in the midst of the American invasion. From Carrier’s perspective, growing up with the Mormon community of Utah prepared him for encountering instances of religious fanaticism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He compares his personal experiences with the Mormon community and some of the more notorious incidents related to Mormonism (i.e., the Elizabeth Smart case) with his experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, rather than placing the blame on religion, the author states that he only takes issue with the belief that God has a chosen people to whom he gave land, since this removes land and liberty from another. The comparison between Mormons in Utah and Muslims in Afghanistan is blurred when the chronological sequence of essays discusses the breakup of his marriage, his investigation of sex trafficking in Cambodia alongside a woman with whom he formed a volatile personal relationship and his struggles with taking a teaching position at a public university in Utah. Carrier draws examples from his personal life to make the argument that when dealing with fanaticism, in any form, acting out of fear will only worsen the problem.
Mostly engrossing stories of travel interspersed with historical vignettes and the author’s private struggles to argue for a move away from persecution of believers.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61902-121-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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