An important and eminently readable account from the heart of chaos.
Intense, immediate reporting from the front lines in Afghanistan.
Seized, as soon as the destruction of September 11 became known, with the idea of filing from Afghanistan, New Yorker correspondent Anderson found he needed to bring all of his experience into play just to get into the country. (“One can always find a way to get smuggled in,” he assured his editor, Sharon DeLano, by e-mail on September 12th.) He made it about two weeks later and began sending reports on the lay of the land, the combatants, and the state of affairs among civilians. Here, he presents those pieces, written over the next eight months, in conjunction with his e-mail correspondence with DeLano. The essays (most previously published in the New Yorker) offer snapshots of the war’s progress as Anderson chews over the progression of events with local Northern Alliance leaders, pokes around an abandoned bin Laden compound, interviews the occasional Afghan woman who will risk being seen with him, ferrets out the origin of the rumors of poisoned humanitarian aid rations (some Afghans had eaten the preservative drying agents that keep the food fresh), and casts an eye over Kabul after the fall of the Taliban. His e-mail traces how he got these stories. The result is a sort of war-watcher’s travelogue, letting us in on the vicissitudes that dictate where our man winds up: the difficulties of getting visas, or even moving from one town to another along bandit-controlled byways; the free-wheeling insults traded between reporters and cranky, gun-wielding fighters; the kluges necessitated by meeting deadlines in a pre-industrial landscape; and the love inspired by a fully functional Toughbook computer and Inmarsat satellite phone.
An important and eminently readable account from the heart of chaos.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8021-1723-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
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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