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. […]
If you don’t mind crying in public, pick up this book
I’m not being dramatic. I burst into tears during my lunch break reading Åsne Seierstad’s devastating and chilling account of the 2011 terrorist attack in Norway. I thought about closing my book and pulling myself together, but I was too invested. Instead, I just let my hair cover my face and hope no one noticed. One of Us starts with two teenagers running for their lives. They’re being hunted by a strange man in a police officer’s uniform on a small Norwegian island. Unable to find […]
A Kafkaesque Nightmare
“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”– George Orwell, 1984 Ben Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” It’s a sentiment this country has been at odds with since its inception, from the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, […]
Funny exciting spoof of today’s terror/anti-terror geopolitics
If you love spy stories and spoofs of spy stories, you’ll love this debut novel by that sharp-tongued dry-humored wit named Hugh Laurie, best known to Americans for his brilliant but irritating Dr. House television character. Laurie’s hero in The Gun Seller is Thomas Lang, a former Scots Guard turned man-for-hire whose first line in the book is “Imagine that you have to break someone’s arm.” He goes through all the ways such thuggery can be accomplished, and it is not until several paragraphs in […]
A French mystery that dabbles in immigration issues and murder
Intrepid Parisian detective Aimee Leduc is back with another murder to solve, and it takes place in Belleville, a heavily Arab neighborhood rife with tension, mystery, violence and pathos. Leduc has been asked by the sister of her best friend to help her. The sister is married to a government minister and Aimee had actually attended their wedding several years earlier. Now, the sister suspects her husband of straying and wants Aimee to intervene. But when Aimee, a software specialist, reluctantly agrees to meet Anais […]
Pros and Cons of Using Killer Drones
A relatively even-handed and close-up look—in fictional form–at the U.S. drone program currently used in the so-called “war on terrorism,” Sting of the Drone provides the reader with an insider’s view of one of the latest and most controversial weapons currently being employed by the Obama administration. Clarke, a 30-year veteran national security advisor to multiple U.S. governments, gives us a fictionalized account of an impending Christmas attack on several U.S. cities by a combined force of al-Qaeda and drug cartel elements from “that side […]