Los Angeles Times
August 15, 2004
(Review of The Stone Fields: An Epitah for the Living. By Courtney Angela Brkic)
It used to be that a young American, seeking adventure or enlightenment, would join the Peace Corps and, after two years in a distant locale, return home with an abundance of exotic memories ...
The Washington Post
December 24, 2000
(Review of “This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis” by Karl Maier)
A book that begins with a taxi story usually begins colorfully. Karl Maier opens This House Has Fallen with a wild brawl that broke out when his taxi got caught in traffic in Port Harcourt, ...
The Washington Post
August 27, 2000
(Review of “Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda” by Scott Peterson)
Africa is an expression of vastness. It is a matter not just of size but of drama and emotion; so much occurs in Africa, and at so many extremes. This is a blessing ...
George Magazine
December 1999
When you drove into wartime Sarajevo along Sniper Alley, you passed a wall that bore the slogan “Welcome to Hell.” This dark greeting would be appropriate for each of the bloodied nations that photojournalist James Nachtwey visited in the last decade of the ...
The Washington Post
February 21, 1999
(Review of “In the Cellar,” by Jan Philipp Reemtsma)
What can be said about a book in which the author vows to avoid a vivid narrative style and vivid metaphors? In which, writing of a traumatic experience he endured, he retreats into the third person, ...
The Washington Post
December 10, 1998
(Review of “Dragonfly: Nasa and the Crisis Aboard Mir” by Bryan Burrough)
Space flight is in vogue again. The journey of John Glenn has refocused attention on the fascinating spectacle of humans soaring into the heavens on rockets that make the ground ...
The Washington Post
August 20, 1997
(The following is a review of “Montenegro” by Starling Lawrence)
There is a passage in Rebecca West’s classic book about the Balkans, “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” in which she wrote of being waked in a Paris hotel room by “the insufficiently ...
The Washington Post
August 25, 1996
(The following is a review of “Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey” by Fergal Keane)
HOW DO you explain what war is like? How do you explain the mad violence of drunken soldiers or the spiritual ruins that survivors have been turned into? And how do you ...
