by Souad Mekhennet ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2017
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
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BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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by Jon Krakauer
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by Jon Krakauer
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by Jon Krakauer
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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