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ZERO FOOTPRINT

Name: ZERO FOOTPRINT
Author: Simon Chase
ISBN: 978-0-316-34224-7

THE TRUE STORY OF A PRIVATE MILITARY CONTRACTOR'S COVERT ASSIGNMENTS IN SYRIA, LIBYA, AND THE WORLD'S MOST DANGEROUS PLACES

by Simon Chase & Ralph Pezzullo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 12, 2016

Detailed, acronym-mad, well-wrought, and exciting.

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A well-developed look inside the life and work of an accomplished private military contractor.

Formerly with the British Royal Marines and British special forces, Chase (a pen name, aided in this absorbing narrative by co-author Pezzullo) found an enticing and lucrative segue as a private military operator in such dangerous hot spots as Afghanistan and Iraq from 1999 until recently. Hired to do “the dirty and dangerous jobs the military and intelligence services can’t or don’t want to do,” Chase initially found his special services attractive to companies like Scimitar Security, which needed to provide security to the prime minister of Qatar. After 9/11, however, the jobs became increasingly perilous and high level, involving the U.S. government’s need to arm and support the Afghan Northern Alliance against the Taliban and even track Osama bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora in 2004—a disastrous mission that accomplished very little and cost the lives of three members of Chase's team. In Iraq, Chase was part of the U.S. government’s efforts to rebuild the country. Special-forces units needed to do “recon and hearts-and-minds work” in remote areas where sympathy for foreigners was never ensured. Since the U.S. government could not be caught openly aiding the rebels against the Syrian regime, it hired contractors like Chase to help arm the Free Syrian Army (“zero footprint”) and even, according to his spectacular revelations, ascertain firsthand whether President Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons on the rebels. Another amazing depiction involves the attack on the U.S. Embassy compound in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, where Chase found himself fortuitously, having been hired to do gunrunning and doing business with some of the same jihadis he had previously been fighting. Throughout, the author candidly shares the emotional toll that the constant danger took on his life and the lives of his colleagues.

Detailed, acronym-mad, well-wrought, and exciting.

Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-316-34224-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015

Categories:

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
FILLED WITH FIRE AND LIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

- BOOK REVIEW
THE TALE OF A NIGGUN
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

- BOOK REVIEW
NIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)