A mostly illuminating literary debut that shows how Americans’ ignorance about the world has made turmoil and terrorism...
A journalist questions the notion of American exceptionalism.
When New York Times Magazine contributing writer Hansen arrived in Turkey in 2007 on a research fellowship, she harbored a deep faith in America’s “inherent goodness, as well as in my country’s Western way of living, and perhaps in my own inherent, God-given, Christian-American goodness as well.” She assumed that any nation’s move toward modernity “in the American sense” meant progress. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, where international geography had been cut from the school curriculum, she knew little about the world; even as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, she hardly noticed international events. Living in a “zone of miraculous neutrality” about her country’s role in foreign affairs, she naively and complacently believed America to have “uniquely benevolent intentions toward the peoples of the world.” That view changed dramatically as she traveled through the Middle East, reading history and political analysis and conducting many interviews in Turkey, Afghanistan, Greece, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. She discovered that fear of “communism, Islamism, or any other enemyism of the United States” led America to foster military dictatorships rather than risk the outcomes of democratic elections. Talking with Egyptian dissidents and Muslim Brothers, for example, Hansen learned of the corruption, torture, and repression resulting from American efforts to undermine Egypt with the aim of gaining power in the Arab world. She concludes that keeping Americans unaware about global issues has served such efforts, unleashed hatred abroad, and contributed to the rise of Donald Trump. Examining her own identity as an observer and writer forms a recurring theme: was she endorsing America’s penchant for denial if she wrote about a foreign country without fully understanding its history, including America’s role? Hansen offers a heartfelt plea for empathy and a recognition of “the realities of millions of people,” but honing a sophisticated global perspective seems far more complicated than she acknowledges here.
A mostly illuminating literary debut that shows how Americans’ ignorance about the world has made turmoil and terrorism possible.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-28004-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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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