A powerful work of investigative journalism, one that speaks volumes about the business of war and of human slavery alike.
How war profiteering in the Middle East tore apart a village in the Himalayan foothills.
In 2004, writes London-based Businessweek senior international correspondent Simpson, not long after the U.S. invaded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a recruiter came calling in Kathmandu, ostensibly looking for workers at a luxury hotel in Jordan. In fact, those who answered the call were placed in the hands of people such as a former dry cleaner who ran a so-called body shop in Amman: “If you needed the ‘bodies’ of menial laborers, you went to Ali al-Nadi.” So it was that American military contractors in Iraq found their way to al-Nadi’s door to fill their ranks, and a dozen men from that Nepali village found themselves on the way to enriching everyone but themselves—but briefly, for on their way to the contractor’s camp within a vast U.S. air base, they were kidnapped by Islamist militants who declared the Nepalis “infidels” inasmuch as they were working in the service of the “Crusaders.” The Nepalis were executed, leaving it to their survivors to wonder how they had ended up in an American war zone in the first place. The answer, untangled by Kamala Magar, the widow of one of the Nepalis—whom the author interviewed numerous times in 2005, 2013, 2014, and 2016—came to implicate the largest American military contractor in Iraq in a sordid chain of human trafficking. Of course, the contractor continually denied the allegations throughout a long process of legal discovery, parts of which went all the way to the Supreme Court. Suffice it to say that, given the choice of ruling in favor of an utterly commendable Nepali widow of questionable legal standing but with an unflagging commitment to justice or a multibillion-dollar corporation with unlimited legal funds, the courts did not often honor the ideals of the law.
A powerful work of investigative journalism, one that speaks volumes about the business of war and of human slavery alike.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-244971-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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
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
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