He was a wannabe gangster and a high school dropout who got tattoos, drank and smoked, and sold drugs on the streets of Jordan. His mother was so concerned, she sent him to Muslim self-help classes. There, Ahmad Fadil found a new path. By the time he was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006, Fadil-by then known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi- had lead a new terrorist insurgency in Iraq and Jordan that resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths. That group was ISIS. […]
Not your great-great-grandfather’s War of the Worlds.
Throughout the entirety of this book’s length, I was thinking of how best to frame it to you guys. Because I think it’s really good, and I want more people to read it. I have a soft spot for end-of-the-world/invasion/post-apocalyptic fiction, and Fear the Sky offered me something wholly different and unexpected: a rich story that isn’t just a vehicle for the decimation of society. Imagine Independence Day, only the aliens are smart enough to send (ten years in advance of their invasion fleet) a […]
Oh, the places you’ll go!
It was months after 9/11 when Rory Stewart decided to walk across Afghanistan. The country was in disarray, but despite warnings from the Afghan government, villagers and anyone with a lick of common sense, Stewart insisted on going. One foreign journalist, after hearing his plan, asked Stewart if he’d ever read Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer’s story of an American dumbass who tried to make it in the Alaskan wilderness without any supplies (I know we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but […]
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
I picked up The Unforgiving Minute as it was on the 2014 U.S. Army Chief of Staff’s Professional Reading List. As I’ve mentioned before, I love to read fiction for fun but I was commuting an hour to work each way so I decided to listen to audiobooks to pass the time. I thought it would benefit me professionally to read the books recommended by the leader of my branch of service. This book became available in April and I listened to it over the […]
The Best War Reporting I’ve Encountered
War, as the title suggests, is the best war reporting I’ve encountered in my reading thus far. Like everyone’s favorite war-ish cliché, War is visceral. It is heartbreaking. It evokes rage. It harbors contempt. It loves. In the summers of 2007 and 2008 Junger embedded with Battle Company 2/503 Infantry Regiment in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. He was joined by photographer Tim Hetherington. Junger stated that his goal was to just report and even said “It’s a completely apolitical film. We wanted to give viewers the […]
The story of modern Afghanistan
Twenty-eighth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. I had once asked Tame SheWolf why she doesn’t like to read Khaled Hosseini and she had said that it had caused her too much pain when she read The Kite Runner. So much, in fact, that she decided never to read Khaled Hosseini again. I was profoundly affected by The Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini even became one of my favorite authors. And though it left me sad, it didn’t destroy me. It told me the story of life affected by […]