Ok, I admit that some of the seven five-star Amazon reviews of WANDERJAHRE were probably written by friends but hey, why not? After all, I wrote this book for my friends, too. My old pal Ben just read it and here is what he had to say about it... I thoroughly enjoyed Wanderjahre, Lutz Kleveman’s account of his career as a warzone correspondent. Reconciling his family history with his own quest to travel to this world’s forsaken places, the author’s journey to manhood is riveting and entertaining while being much more than just a collection of conflict dispatches. Kleveman is at his youthful best in West Africa – ignorant of the many risks he is taking and – in his own ways – the most empathetic. His journalistic style is different from the many career war correspondents he meets along his journeys. Kleveman is literally kicking the tyres and manages to look at the conflicts through the eyes of other young men: not because he is a silent observer, but because he is a boisterous and at times arrogant insertion onto the scenes he is witnessing. His is thus a more immediate and perhaps less analytical journalism. Rather than explaining the world to the armchair reader, his book is a treasure trove of hair-raising anecdotes and in that a great portrait of the crazy post-9/11 world in which young freelancers like Kleveman rewrote the rules of journalism thanks to the power of the internet. Personally I found that the main strength of the book stems from the sections in which Kleveman talks about his quest to add a new meaning to his life given that his wild years, or Wanderjahre, are now largely over. To him, one way of doing this is to ponder his father’s and grandfather’s role in Germany’s history and connect his own thirst for wars with a militaristic streak apparently running in his family. These reflections’ setting of an epic yet monotonous Russian rail journey fits perfectly, as they break up the various warzone chapters nicely. It is this courage of a man in his late thirties that I found most disarming and inspiring; the courage to find discontinuities in one’s life and act upon them by understanding one’s own past and that of his family. Highly recommended. amazon/Wanderjahre-Reporters-Journey-Mad-World-ebook/dp/B00KB2R2CQ/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 14:38:00 +0000
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