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Title: The Hunter, The Hammer, and Heaven: Journeys to Three Worlds Gone Mad by Robert Young Pelton ISBN: 1-58574-416-6 Publisher: The Lyons Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.14 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Helpful in Understanding a World Gone Mad
Comment:
I know the author personally. He has spoken twice to my international conference of intelligence professionals from over 40 countries, and by common acclaim has been invited to join us each year, forever.
This is not a "tough guy" or thrill seeker. Robert Young Pelton is an unassuming gentle person who created a niche for himself with his annually updated "World's Most Dangerous Places" and the related Discovery TV program "Come Back Alive," and in the process discovered that most Embassies and most journalists don't look for the truth, much less find it.
In this book, he has done something useful that could not be achieved with his more focused and fragmented country by country almanac of world dangers. He has chosen three representative renditions of hell on earth--one dealing with the greed and corruption of diamond mining in Sierra Leone; another dealing with religious intolerance and government terrorism in Chechnya; and the third dealing with massive environmental as well as economic issues in Papua New Guinea.
Each of the three stories combines a rather matter of fact but most interesting story of exactly how he gets in and out of places and who he sees and what they say; with his insights on where the various parties are clashing and how they are doing. Each of these "case studies" is distinct, but taken together, they give one the sense of dispair that comes from reading Robert Kaplan, or William Shawcross, or Ralph Peters.
Robert Young Pelton is as close as I have found to a true global "intelligence minuteman" capable of getting at ground truth using only legal and ethical methods. He is unique for having traversed the earth and seen it all, as well as for putting such knowledge in the hands of the taxpayers who fund our government's continuing exclusion of such places from the public debate over the future of our peace and prosperity.
If we are ever to get a grip on foreign policy and national security spending, it will be authors such as Robert Young Pelton that make it possible for "the people" to take back the power over how we spend taxpayer funds.
Rating: 4
Summary: First-Class Journalism in Places the World Forgot
Comment: I stumbled across Robert Young Pelton's comebackalive.com website while researching the topic of mercenaries in Africa, and paused to take a look at one of his books. The time was well spent, numerous typos and grammatical errors notwithstanding. Let's hope his next manuscript gets better proofreading.
Pelton's "The Hunter, the Hammer, and Heaven" chronicles the author's fearless journeys into three separate hearts of darkness: Sierra Leone, Chechnya, and Bougainville. Each is a place where surely angels would fear to tread, but Pelton, with careful persistence, deftly tiptoes through each, and not only comes back alive, but brings the raw, gritty truths of modern war with him. Places that are usually just a few lines buried in the back page of the Sunday paper spring to hair-raising life as Pelton gets to know the people in each place, and their motivations for fighting.
There is a lot of excellent material here for anybody who is trying to sort out all the players in these hellholes without benefit of a scorecard, and reading this book will impart a much deeper understanding of how and why such conflicts occur.
Another impression the reader will get is that the media outlets of the world are hopelessly out of touch, far more concerned with the color of Hillary Clinton's underwear than with the chaos, death and destruction that they are too lazy or corrupt to see. In my case, Pelton's reporting served only to underscore what I already knew - the media giants are completely out of touch, but in ways I never realized until I read this gutsy man's words.
The book also serves as a window into the shadowy private military operations (like Sandline International and Executive Outcomes) that have superseded the mercenary armies of the 60's and 70's. The book makes (in my opinion) a convincing argument for supporting such actions, rather than condemning them as has been done over and over in the mainstream media. Upon reading this book, you'll come away with a much better understanding of each hot-spot, and a profound respect for Pelton's awe-inspiring courage in seeking out and telling the truth. Highly recommended.
Rating: 2
Summary: Intriguing topics; Awful writing and editing
Comment: I don't think much of the World's Most Dangerous Places, but I was surprised to find that this book was so astoundingly poorly written. Mr Pelton is clearly a better adventurer than he is a writer, and in fact these stories would have been far better if they had been ghost-written.
The topics are intriguing; stories of the chaos and nonsense that come of policymaking by the corrupt, small-minded, evil, or uninformed are nearly always good reading, and Pelton's tales of mercenaries being hired by sovereign governments and indigenous revolutionary movements in the sunny South Pacific are no exception. He is clearly capable of winning the trust of some unsavory and fascinating characters. But the output is marred by what seems to be an almost willful lack of editing, on either the macro or micro scale. The stories do not hang together, events occuring out of chronological sequence with little narrative justification. And the sentence structure, grammatical mistakes, and typos made me literally angry; I believe that when I pay full price for an expensive hardback book part of what the publisher owes me is decent copy editing.
In the end, neither Pelton nor Lyons Press should be rewarded for producing this kind of slipshod material. "The Hunter, The Hammer, and Heaven" was clearly output to capitalize on Mr Pelton's fame as the creator of the World's Most Dangerous Places, but the gratuitous low quality of the book is an insult to readers. With another week or two of editing and review this could have been a solid if unremarkable product; as it is, "The Hunter..." is merely an exercise in frustration.
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Title: Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places : 5th Edition by Robert Young Pelton ISBN: 0060011602 Publisher: HarperResource Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: The Adventurist : My Life in Dangerous Places by Robert Young Pelton ISBN: 0767905768 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 19 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Come Back Alive by Robert Young Pelton ISBN: 0385495668 Publisher: Main Street Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Ransom: The Untold Story of International Kidnapping by Ann Hagedorn Auerbach ISBN: 0805061266 Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: June, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: My Jihad: One American's Journey Through the World of Usama Bin Laden--as a Covert Operative for the American Government by Aukai Collins ISBN: 0743470591 Publisher: Pocket Star Pub. Date: 01 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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