A book of journeys at once personal and universal.
A literate travelogue through troubled lands where the clash of civilizations is resounding loudly—and ever louder.
British journalist Burke (Al-Qaeda, 2004) logged time in Iraq in the 1990s as a soldier in the cause of Kurdish liberation. The experience gave him a distaste for carrying a gun, but not for traveling through parts of the Muslim world where bullets fly. The often violent travel reports he collects here range from Thailand to Tajikistan to Gaza to Algeria. In the last, he writes, homegrown Islamists recently mounted a failed rebellion. Burke favors the middle ground, and in Algeria, the ordinary people occupying it brushed the fundamentalists and their revolt aside: “It was their eventual disgust for the militants that had ended it.” Just so, Burke, reporting from Iraq, expresses the hope that even though they are hard-pressed on all sides, ordinary Iraqis will find a way to quell extremism and eventually live in peace, even though peace there is quite obviously far away. Burke allows that when the American invasion loomed in 2002, he “felt it was the right war for the wrong reasons, and at totally the wrong time.” Sure that it would reveal truths about modern Islam, however, he packed his notebook and went to Iraq; his accounts from both sides of the battle lines are the best parts here. The U.S. Marines he depicts are as much scared kids as stone killers, while the Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire serve to support his view that there are many kinds of Islam, few capable of being distilled in black-and-white terms. Says one old man at the Battle of Najaf, for instance, when instructed that the Jews are the enemy: “There aren’t any Jews here and anyway a good, honest Jew is better than a bad Muslim.”
A book of journeys at once personal and universal.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-36622-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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