Will reward readers interested in the Iraq war, or disaster management, or anyone interested in taking an intelligent...
Rudyard Kipling meets Dilbert in this engrossing memoir of a year’s service in Iraq by a British member of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
When 30-year-old Stewart took up his post in September 2003 as Acting Governorate Coordinator in Amara in southern Iraq, he had recently walked across Afghanistan (a trek he recounts in The Places in Between, May 2006) and done stints as an infantry officer and member of the British Foreign Service. None of this entirely prepared him for the task of nation-building in a country with a broken command-economy and a political culture consisting of competing conspiracies among tribal sheikhs, gangsters and different flavors of theocrat. The author is careful to point out the many occasions on which the expectations of the Coalition were confounded by events. Having first experimented with appointed councils, for instance, he found that only local elections gave politicians the legitimacy to act. He also learned that the Coalition’s unwillingness to use lethal force to defend property, particularly public property, was not regarded as humane restraint, but as a sign of weakness. He and his colleagues did manage to foster a sort of order in Asmara and later in neighboring Nasiriyah before the handoff of civil authority to the Iraqi interim government in June 2004, though he expresses mixed feelings about the nature of that order. Although his memoir contains some derring-do, notably at the climactic siege of Nasiriyah, this is not really a war story, but rather an account of bureaucracy punctuated by gunfire. The chapters are short, often devoted to a single meeting or conference, and each imparts lessons: how to cajole action when you are not in the chain of command, for instance, or how to make a successful budget request based on ignorance and optimism. Despite its exotic setting, the story is strangely familiar.
Will reward readers interested in the Iraq war, or disaster management, or anyone interested in taking an intelligent adventure.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101235-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
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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