A harrowing, inspiring true story of a woman caught in a cesspool of corruption who refused to become dirty herself.
The frightening odyssey of a business executive who went to work in Afghanistan and ended up fighting a personal war against corruption.
Afghanistan is a land of “horror and beauty,” Greene writes in her debut memoir about her three-year sojourn in the war-ravaged nation. When the Australian native landed in Kabul in 2007 at age 37, she yearned for adventure, so she took a job as a general manager for a company providing supplies to defense organizations. Her naïve enthusiasm quickly gave way to the brutal realities of working in Afghanistan: suicide bombings, rocket attacks, widespread criminality and rampant corruption. Shortly after starting her job, Greene suspected that someone within the company was selling alcohol illegally on the black market; worse still, she found out that she had been set up as the scapegoat. Due to Afghanistan’s perfidious legal system, not only was Greene’s career at risk, but also her freedom—and possibly her life. As a result, she faced a soul-torturing dilemma—look the other way or uncover the truth—and she chose to fight back. This tautly written book is filled with mind-twisting intrigue as Greene recounts how she secretly gathered evidence to expose the conspiracy. Her story contains all the suspense of a mystery novel, but readers may find it all the more unnerving since it happened to a real-life, honest person. Readers will be forced to ask themselves: What would I do? The author’s courageous actions led to a purge in the company, but being a whistle-blower came at a heavy price. Even after the company took corrective action, Greene feared retaliation from angry bootleggers, as the alcohol trade in Afghanistan is similar to that in America during Prohibition—a treacherous world with people willing to do anything to control a lucrative market. Greene, in this fine memoir, shows that her keen sense of intuition and unwavering belief in what she thought was right proved to be her greatest survival tools.
A harrowing, inspiring true story of a woman caught in a cesspool of corruption who refused to become dirty herself.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491709306
Page Count: 270
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
