Graphic and harrowing.
An Italian journalist skillfully recounts his 15 terror-filled days and nights in the hands of the Taliban.
In the spring of 2007, La Repubblica correspondent Mastrogiacomo sought to interview a commander of the resurgent Taliban in Helmand province. Upon his arrival, the reporter—draped in a native shalwar to honor his subject—was abducted along with his interpreter and his driver. At the hands of captors brandishing Kalashnikovs, they were transported across the desert in the trunk of a car and shifted from prison to prison to avoid detection. The captors’ pious objective, a return to the ancient, halcyon world of the Prophet, was aided by modern firepower, satellite phones and video cameras. Their captives, blindfolded and bound, were bodies to be bartered. The prisoners were beaten, flogged and humiliated by young mujahideen who were laughing and singing and ready to die. Mastrogiacomo, accused of being spy, conversed and debated with his keepers. Without the benefit of contemporaneous notes, the author reconstructs, in present-tense journal form, the events of his captivity and the circumstances of his eventual release. He displays no signs of Stockholm syndrome. Mastrogiacomo, who witnessed the beheading of his driver, hates his duplicitous jihadi tormentors, and he presents a searing, frightening tale.
Graphic and harrowing.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-933372-97-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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
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
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