Showing posts with label Pakistan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pakistan. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Not down in any map; true places never are


As for Melville in the 19th century, so it is now.

Blighted Joburg (town/inner-city) is on something of an upswing - in the popular imaginary at least. There's
Hotel Yeoville, a lyrical document of loves and lives in ex-bohemia; there 's Yeoville Studio at Wits, an architecture/urban-planning experiment that, among other things, has produced this guide to eating a whole continent without leaving town.

The Yeoville eating guide is a map of the future: it's a map of potential delight for those who dare. Meanwhile, what of those who are? Right here in Joburg, there are maps of Ethiopia, Senegal,
Côte d'Ivoire, Mozambique, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Bangladesh and more; maps of the present; carried and communicated and explained and rearranged every single day.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo


Murat Kurnaz

In October 2001, nineteen-year-old Murat Kurnaz traveled to Pakistan to visit a madrassa. During a security check a few weeks after his arrival, he was arrested without explanation and for a bounty of $3,000, the Pakistani police sold him to U.S. forces. He was first taken to Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he was severely mistreated, and then two months later he was flown to Guantanamo as Prisoner #61. For more than 1,600 days, he was tortured and lived through hell. Finally, in August 2006, Kurnaz was released, with acknowledgment of his innocence. Told with lucidity, accuracy, and wisdom, Kurnaz's story is both sobering and poignant--an important testimony about our turbulent times when innocent people get caught in the crossfire of the war on terrorism.

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (April 1, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0230603742 # ISBN-13: 978-0230603745