An intense, important read for anyone interested in the American government’s misguided efforts at Guantánamo.
Two former detainees of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp come forward with their stories after being declared innocent and freed.
After seven years in prison with no charges, Boumediene and Idir finally won the right to challenge their imprisonment in court, and they won. While they were never able to see the classified evidence against them, their lawyers successfully argued that their imprisonment was unconstitutional. In 2001, the two men had been arrested in Bosnia on suspicion of bombing the American Embassy; as they were released, American soldiers, with the permission of the Bosnian government, seized the men and took them to Cuba. This no-frills account of their time in Guantánamo is disturbing, as the authors detail their mistreatment at the hands of prison guards and interrogators and how they were held in outdoor cages as the prison was built around them. Readers will be shocked by the lack of evidence against the men and how the tenuous ties among a group of casual friends fueled the government’s crusade against them. The narrative follows both men in turn, giving each the chance to recount his own unique experience. Kept mostly in separate areas of the detention center, they crossed paths occasionally; throughout, their different accounts of the same events don’t feel repetitive. Other than an introduction and some additional material about the authors’ cases, the book is entirely made up of the words of Boumediene and Idir, translated in interviews with Norland and List. The prose is straightforward, which is appropriate given the raw power of the story. Through hunger strikes, forced feedings, isolation cells, and countless other tribulations, the authors stayed strong, and their faith in themselves and their families kept them going.
An intense, important read for anyone interested in the American government’s misguided efforts at Guantánamo.Pub Date: April 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0115-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Redwood Press/Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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