Bashir clearly tries to distance himself from the mess. No dice, but these up-close notes are useful in understanding the...
An apologetic memoir of life in a bloody tyrant’s hip pocket.
People behave strangely in dictatorships. Take the instance, by the account of Saddam Hussein’s personal physician Bashir, when Uday Hussein replied to his valet’s backtalk by cracking his head open. Saddam was none too happy: “I’ll throttle him with my own hands!” he yelled, calming down only when an advisor reminded him that killing his own son wouldn’t bring the dead valet back to life. Doubtless many of the women whom Uday picked up, then beat and tortured, would not have minded seeing him dead; he lived, only to be killed by American troops along with his brother, Qusay. (In that firefight, Bashir says, the bravest fighter was Qusay’s 13-year-old son, Mustafa.) Bashir, an artist frequently honored by Hussein (and responsible for turning an odd snake-slaying dream of his into a widely reproduced painting), was also a gifted reconstructive surgeon who treated thousands in the course of the bloody, futile Iran-Iraq War; afterward, he wound up doing untold nose jobs, for, he writes, “It is well known that few Arab women are happy with their noses.” Surely many women in the Hussein circle were not, and even at the outbreak of the latest war, some were coming to him for buttock reductions, breast resizings and, yes, nose jobs. The sightings of Saddam himself in Bashir’s pages are only occasional, but they are revealing: They show at turns a pragmatist, though one whose inner circle could not convince him to abandon his hatred of Israel and come to terms with Britain and the U.S. before it was too late, and at other turns a romantic, given to writing gushy genre novels in which someone very like him turns out to be the hero.
Bashir clearly tries to distance himself from the mess. No dice, but these up-close notes are useful in understanding the Hussein regime.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-349-11935-X
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Abacus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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
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