Drawing on his own experience of war zones, Michael Ignatieff probes the damage that blights Charlie’s life and threatens to destroy his humanity, the result of years of reporting terrible events. Charlie has people who love him—his family in London, and generous, tough colleagues like Jacek and the indefatigable and beautiful Etta. But once he sets out on his journey of revenge, nothing and no one can stop him.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 5, 2004 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780143181323
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780143181323
- File size: 284 KB
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Accessibility
No publisher statement provided -
Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Publisher's Weekly
September 15, 2003
Ignatieff possesses one of the most impressive résumés in contemporary letters. A Harvard-based scholar, he writes for an array of high-profile outlets, including the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and has produced well-regarded works of history (Blood and Belonging, etc.), memoir (The Russian Album, etc.) and fiction (Asya and Scar Tissue, shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize). Thus readers may be disappointed by this slight novel, which doesn't make full use of the author's literary powers. Charlie Johnson is a familiar type, a world-weary war correspondent who neglects his family and only feels at home in ravaged countrysides and in the seedy hotel bars that are "someone's idea of an oasis." He's covering yet another armed conflict, somewhere in the former Yugoslavia, when something truly shocking occurs: a woman is set on fire before his eyes. Charlie, feeling responsible for her death, sinks into a depression, leaves his wife and daughter, and hides out on the Polish farm of his cameraman, Jacek. Only one thing is able to rouse Charlie from his convalescence—the idea of inflicting serious physical harm on the brutal commander who supervised the burning. He returns to Belgrade and joins up with a "fixer" named Buddy, determined to find the commander no matter what the personal cost. Ignatieff, who has covered his share of nasty conflicts, doesn't glamorize the war journalist's trade—but neither does he move beyond the standard clichés (the neglected wife, the nagging boss, the loyal sidekick). This is a readable but standard tale of redemption and revenge, one that would have benefited from the layers of psychological and political insight that Ignatieff brings to the rest of his work.
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