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Lädt ... My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Frontvon Jonathan Raban
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Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. Though nothing much new in these reflections on post 9/11 America, it's always a pleasure to spend time in Raban's company. Vivid pictures, learning lightly held, insight and warmth of character. Good sketch of the alienated Muslim loner in the Western world as the archetypal extremist going back to Qutb. Their thoughts an odd mix of Right wing (Spengler, TS Eliot of the Waste Land) and Left radicalism, set in the desperate squalor of, say, Streatham High St. also how the neocon agenda is as mystical and fact-denying as the Jiadist. Hints at explanation of how US embodies both rational scientific attitude with faith-based follies. Lovely road-trip with his daughter down the West Coast Seattle to Mexico provides an idyllic relief from the contradictions and lurking violence. ( ) What an extraordinary revelation this book was. I purchased it some years ago, and it had sat on top of my wardrobe until just a couple of days ago, but I wish I had read it back when I got it! I also wish many of the decision-makers in the western world had taken the time to read Raban's considered arguments, who cannot be dismissed as simply being 'of the left'. There is great depth to Raban's writings (as evidenced by his various awards). The background contained here that discusses the ad hoc decisions made years ago (mainly by the UK) as to where borders in the middle east should be, gives the reader great insight into the depth of the problem that confronts us now. Collected essays from award-winning journalist Rabin, with Bush's war on terror as the unifying theme. In one essay the author explores his own rebellious roots, and the roots of the Al-Qaeda: in the early 1960s the Egyptian poet and critic Sayyid Qutb toured America and came away with a hatred of America, a deep mistrust of the West and the treatise Milestones, the Mein Kampf of the jihad movement. Collected essays from award-winning journalist Rabin, with Bush’s war on terror as the unifying theme. In one essay the author explores his own rebellious roots, and the roots of the Al-Qaeda: in the early 1960s the Egyptian poet and critic Sayyid Qutb toured America and came away with a hatred of America, a deep mistrust of the West and the treatise Milestones, the Mein Kampf of the jihad movement. Highly recommended. Reviewed by: John Zeige 5 von 5
In the course of these 17 essays, offered chronologically as an amateur's diary, this confidence gives way under a president who declares every setback a victory. The rationalist in Raban gradually relinquishes the "benign illusion that facts will out, that if you expose a created reality to the corrosive drip of hard news it will eventually rust away." What kind of wormhole have you entered, Raban wonders, when the alternative to being afraid of what the government tells you is to be afraid of what it isn't telling you? "The whole business," he writes, "is wonderfully, invulnerably circular." Auszeichnungen
Ranging from Seattle to Cairo, from the high seas to the US presidential campaign, Raban brings a distinctive and often unexpected perspective to the issues facing post-September 11 America. What does the "war on terror" and a new era of religious ferocity look like to an Englishman living in the Pacific Northwest? Jonathan Raban finds, as he reads the source texts that have inspired modern-day jihad, memories of his own adolescent atheism help him understand why young people suffering from cultural alienation and moral uncertainty turn to a backward-looking version of Islam to help them resist the upheavals of modernity. Raban reflects on the Bush administration's manipulation of the threat of terrorism to undermine civil rights. In diagnosing what has gone wrong in the Iraq war, he emphasizes the US failure to understand the history of the Middle East, and explains the region's shifting and complex loyalties of religion and ethnicity. He traces the continuing support for a disastrous war to the legacy of American Puritanism: the tendency of Americans to be inspired by a religious fervor oblivious to history and reason. And he explores the increasing polarization of American politics, as exemplified by the issues that he has seen divide his urban from his non urban neighbors in the Northwest. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)973.931History and Geography North America United States 1901- Bush Administration And Beyond George W. BushKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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