A fascinating behind-the scenes look at the United Nations in operation and at the life of a high-level diplomat. The author, a former UN staff member, focuses on his own career to show how the UN constantly juggles its language and its decisions to demonstrate its impartiality in important affairs. Picco was constantly on the frontlines: he was involved in the UN’s efforts to end the Afghanistan war, mediate the Iran-Iraq war, and resolve the Lebanese hostage situation. He offers revelatory insights into these major stories, writing with a crisp turn of phrase that makes even the most tedious of diplomatic memoranda seem exciting. When the action heats up, the book becomes difficult to even put down (a rarity among tomes of diplomatic history). Among the most riveting sections are those describing Picco’s negotiations with the captors of Terry Anderson and the other Lebanese hostages and his audience with Saddam Hussein to help negotiate peace in Iraq’s war with Iran. Underpinning the events-driven narrative is a more thematic tale: the story of how the UN discovered a new activist role for itself in the post—Cold War world. Picco clearly believes that the UN’s men and women have become the true architects of a new world order. His memoir manages to elevate itself to the first tier of current affairs books and offers fresh insight on many of the most memorable events in recent international affairs. A must-read for anyone who wants to know what the UN really does. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 17, 1999
ISBN: 0-8129-2910-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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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