An incredible tale told with intensity by two very lucky people.
Gripping account of journalist Garen's kidnapping in southern Iraq and his fiancée's efforts in the U.S. to secure his release.
In the summer of 2004, Garen and Carleton, professional as well as romantic partners, were gathering footage for a documentary about the looting of Iraqi historical sites. At the end of the project, Carleton left the country while Garen stayed behind to close up shop. The day before he was scheduled to leave, however, things went wrong. While in a local market, Garen made the mistake of opening his mouth, revealing himself as a foreigner. In moments, an angry mob coalesced and he and his translator were taken prisoner. Garen and Carleton tell the remarkable story of the men's kidnapping, their families' desperate efforts to have them freed and their astounding release just over a week later. Carleton and Garen take turns relating their experiences through the days of captivity. While Garen is hustled into a hut in a scrubby no-man's land, Carleton, in her last few moments of blissful unawareness, goes to the gym and checks her e-mail. Garen gives an hour-by-hour account of where he was taken, how he was treated, how he hoped to escape. Carleton, meanwhile, assembles a massive team of colleagues in Iraq, well-connected former classmates from the Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (there's a graduate degree that was worthwhile), and, soon enough, the FBI—all working feverishly to reach the sheiks who could then reach the kidnappers. The authors do an admirable job of leading the reader through the chaos of their days, and although the ending is a foregone conclusion, their story remains extraordinarily compelling.
An incredible tale told with intensity by two very lucky people.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-7660-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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