Dramatic and impressive, calling into question the voyeuristic war reporting of media conglomerates.
Well-executed, troubling account of a foreign correspondent’s addiction to combat zones.
Canadian-born Stewart, currently a fellow at Stanford, begins with a chilling portrait of his January 1999 encounter with a rebel in Freetown, Sierra Leone, who machine-gunned a government convoy, killing Stewart’s Associated Press colleague Myles Tierney and leaving Stewart with a bullet lodged in his brain. He then backtracks, describing his formative years as a journalist. After a dull start at the Toronto Star, he traveled to Asia for a more exciting beat with the Hong Kong Standard and UPI. He portrays an environment suited to hungry young reporters; by 27, he was UPI’s New Delhi bureau chief. His initial experiences in war zones—Indian snipers fired on him in Kashmir; in Afghanistan, he was briefly detained as a possible spy—caused him to crave more action, which he found as AP’s West African bureau chief. Based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, he was shocked by the region’s absurd bureaucracies and desperate poverty: “On almost every street, I was swarmed by clusters of scurrying little urchins.” To Stewart’s credit, his experiences covering Africa’s forgotten yet brutal conflicts cause him to question the atavistic career-mindedness that seemingly motivates war journalists. He recalls horrific scenes of torture, rape, summary execution, warfare conducted by children, and terrorist maimings, yet he indicates that Western approaches to such stories have accomplished little regarding the depredations of strongmen like Nigeria’s Sani Abacha and groups like Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front, renowned for their cruelty. Following Stewart’s injury, his AP colleagues arranged his evacuation via Swiss air ambulance to London, where a top neurosurgeon gave him a 20% chance of survival. The final third of his memoir depicts his difficult return to health, portraying both the support offered by his family and friends and his personal disorientation and anguish regarding the death of his friend Myles.
Dramatic and impressive, calling into question the voyeuristic war reporting of media conglomerates.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-380-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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