Little in this distressing, revealing book portends hope for bridge building, but Mekhennet provides an eye-opening picture.
An unsettling firsthand report on the motivations of jihadis.
A Muslim raised in Germany, Washington Post national security correspondent Mekhennet (co-author: The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim, 2014, etc.) was inspired by the movie All the President’s Men to become an investigative journalist: “I could see that journalists didn’t simply write what happened; what they wrote could change lives.” Her first contribution to the American press came in September 2002, in a piece for the Post on “Hamburg’s Cauldron of Terror.” At the trial of the first man accused of being an accessory to the 9/11 attacks, she met the widow of a New York firefighter who blamed the American government and news media for keeping citizens ignorant of hatred against the West. Based on copious interviews with members of jihadi groups, torture victims, families of men drawn into terrorism, refugees, and desperate citizens, Mekhennet helps to remedy that ignorance by exposing the sources of rage. In addition to on-site research in the Middle East and Europe, where she traveled on assignment for major news outlets, she spent a year as a Nieman Fellow researching long-term strategies of terrorist organizations. She is as frustrated with the West’s insistence that all Muslins are terrorists as she is with the horrific image of the West held by indoctrinated jihadi militants, who watch videos of atrocities carried out by Western-backed regimes as part of the recruitment process. Some militants feel alienated from cultures that treat them like outsiders; others join a struggle of Shia against Sunni. Mekhennet is also frustrated by the Western media’s glossing over reality: she wonders, for example, why the uprisings known as the Arab Spring were not shown to be “turning formerly stable countries into security threats” roiled by sectarian rift. The author sees “a clash between those who want to build bridges and those who would rather see the world in polarities” and to spread hatred.
Little in this distressing, revealing book portends hope for bridge building, but Mekhennet provides an eye-opening picture.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62779-897-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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