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圖書館 | 資料類型 | 書架號 | 子計數 | 书架位置 | 狀態 | 館藏預約 |
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正在查詢... Branch | Book | 362.87 ANDERSON | 1 | Stacks | 正在查詢... 未知 | 正在查詢... 不可借閱 |
正在查詢... Science | Book | 362.87 AN24M 1999 | 1 | Stacks | 正在查詢... 未知 | 正在查詢... 不可借閱 |
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摘要
摘要
What makes a man a hero, and what price must he pay? For one man, the answers came in the scariest place on earth. Fred Cuny spent his life in terrible places. In countries rent by war, earthquake, famine, and hurricane, Cuny saved hundreds of thousands of lives with a fearlessness that amazed all who knew him. A Texan, a teller of tall tales, a womanizer, and a renegade, Cuny grew ever more daring in his globe-trotting adventures as his motivations became murkier. Was he a danger junkie? A CIA spy? Or a man who truly believed he had the wits and courage to save the world? After twenty-five years of heroic work that earned Cuny the nickname "Master of Disaster," he set off to the rogue Russian republic of Chechnya, a land of gangsters and Islamic terrorists, a quasi-state engaged in an unimaginably savage war with a Russian army of drunken, brutal incompetents. Cuny went to try to stop the war, but for the first time in his life he was scared, unsure of himself in an insane landscape where betrayal and murder lurked behind every face. He failed to stop the horror, yet soon returned to Chechnya on a mysterious mission. Cuny was last seen on a lonely mountain road, headed for a rebel fortress that was being subjected to the most intense artillery bombardment since World War II. War correspondent Scott Anderson became obsessed with Cuny's fate, and ventured into the deadly war zone himself in search of answers to several haunting questions: Whom was Cuny working for? What happened to him, and why? Most powerfully, what sort of man believes he can save the world? The answers to these questions form the heart of this extraordinary narrative, a true-life thriller that brings to light the chaos, treachery, and danger of the "new world order."The Man Who Tried to Save the Worldis a tour de force of literary journalism and an utterly compelling read.
評論 (4)
《出版社週刊》(Publisher's Weekly)評論
Not even Anderson's intrepid reporting and formidable storytelling skills can bring clarity to the case of Fred Cuny, the legendary relief worker who disappeared in Chechnya in 1995. This is the fault of circumstances rather than of the author, a veteran reporter and novelist (Triage). Known as the Master of Disaster, Cuny was a charismatic Texan who made a career out of bringing relief to civilians displaced by war, winning a reputation for cutting through the bureaucratic tangles of larger relief organizations and governments. Anderson seeks to shed light on two enigmas: the character of Fred Cuny, and the mystery of his disappearance. On the first score, Anderson succumbs to some facile psychologizing; on the second, he does much better, portraying the "snake pit" that was Chechnya, a place where arms smuggling, drug trafficking and graft obscured the lines of battle so completely that it was frequently impossible to determine who was fighting whom at any given moment. Cuny, who had seen his share of battle zones, called it "the scariest place I have ever been." The skill with which Anderson leads readers through a maze of lies and half truths advanced by Russian intelligence, Chechen rebels and others makes readers believe that Chechnya is impenetrable. So, by the book's end, when Anderson advances his own theory about Cuny's disappearance (that he was killed on orders of Chechen president Dzhokar Dudayev, who feared Cuny knew too much about whether or not Dudayev had leftover Soviet nuclear weapons), readers will be hard-pressed to judge whether it's more plausible than any of the conspiracy theories that precede it. And yet, confronted with a Gordian knot of facts and a succession of unreliable sources, Anderson does an admirable job of searching for the truth in a land that truth forgot. Major ad/promo; first serial to Men's Journal; film rights to Monkey Productions (a Disney Company); author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus 評論
A masterful portrait of Fred Cuny, a renegade Texan who certainly deserved his nickname, ``Master of Disaster.'' It's hard to name a major disaster in the last 20 years that didn't find Cuny at the helm of the rescue effort. Operation Provide Comfort, the joint civilian and military effort to save the Iraqi Kurds? Cuny was there and an organizational hero. Somalia? Cuny was there as well. Bosnia too, but that crisis turned his attention from providing relief to creating blueprints for solving man-made disasters, i.e., wars. That decision proved fatal. Cuny's demise came in Chechnya, where he mysteriously disappeared on a so-called relief mission. His body has never been found, despite an intense search by many, including those authorized by top US officials and billionaire philanthropist George Soros's Open Society Institute, which had hired Cuny on many occasions. At its best, the book reads like a Tom Clancy thriller, full of secret meetings, wrong leads, and political innuendo. Cuny's son is told by the Russians that his body, sans face, has been found. But how did they identify him? When the family finally gets the corpse, it's too short and the face turns out to have been obliterated by sulfuric acid. Why the body double? These are just a few of the many questions surrounding this larger-than-life man who dedicated himself to helping others and'not coincidentally, according to journalist and novelist Anderson (Triage, 1998)'to making a reputation for himself. Was Cuny a CIA operative? Was he killed by Chechan rebels after disinformation spread by Russian intelligence operatives claimed he was anti-Islam? Or was he killed, as Anderson posits, on the order of Chechan President Dudayev? Or something in between? We may never know, but this much is certainly obvious: Cuny was a man whose humanitarian impact cannot be denied and who will be missed. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
《書目》(Booklist)評論
Over the course of a quarter-century, Fred Cuny revolutionized the disaster-relief business, showing both privately operated and government agencies how best to provide aid to the victims of natural and man-made disasters. Along the way, Cuny cultivated a larger-than-life reputation. In April 1995, he headed into the foothills of war-scarred Chechnya and vanished. Anderson's assignment to write a newspaper article about Cuny's disappearance turned into a three-year quest to learn the truth about Cuny's amazing, mysterious life. This is an intensely moving portrait of a man who is impossible to pin down. Was Fred so dedicated to saving lives that he gave his own to save the Chechens? Or was he something more, an agent of the U.S. government whose top-secret activities led to his execution at the hands of the Russians? A fascinating book. --David Pitt
《圖書館雜誌》(Library Journal )書評
At the time of his 1995 disappearance in Chechnya's killing fields, Fred Cuny had attained an extraordinary reputation for providing disaster relief. His efforts had saved literally thousands of refugees in Central America, Kurdistan, and Bosnia, among other places. Where Cuny's advice was ignored (Somalia), the result was greater tragedy. Freelance journalist Anderson, author of the novel Triage (LJ 9/1/98), pieces together the testimony of the many who knew Cuny from the time of his Texas boyhood through his last chaotic days with a mobile trauma unit in Chechnya. Depicting the shifting venues of Cuny's work as a private consultant and sometime employee of the State Department and the Soros Foundation, Anderson helps us distinguish Cuny's "myth" from his remarkable life. In his personal quest to penetrate the "fog of intrigue" surrounding his subject, Anderson delivers a plausible explanation of Cuny's death and reveals the unique terrorism of Russia's Chechnyan war. As a biography, this book begs questions, but as a nonfiction mystery it is gripping. Recommended for public and most academic libraries.ÄZachary T. Irwin, Pennsylvania State Univ., Erie (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.