The open desert was being scraped bare of all vegetation, all life, by giant D-9 bulldozers, reminding him of the Rome plows leveling Vietnam. These machine-made wastes grew up in tumbleweed and real-estate development, a squalid plague of future slums constructed of green two-by-fours. A smudge of poisoned air overhung his homeland. What remains a conceptual maneuver for Heidegger is here given literal representation as a systematic dismantling of the apparatus corrupting our care for the world, and a radical deconstruction of what it means to set our world in order.
It figures, on one hand, as an alternative to the project of modernity exemplified in urban-industrial encroachment, and, on the other, as an alternative to the idea of the techno-industrial state that sanctions such development. The problem, according to this critique, is that those individuals valorizing the wild as a tonic for all the debilitating effects of urban-industrial capitalism were historically often the very ones benefiting from urban-industrial production.
It needs to be stressed, however, that if Abbey invokes frontier nostalgia, he does so to turn it against such class interests. Not only does he democratize the myth of the wild place by giving it into the hands of working men and women—doctor, receptionist, rancher, and soldier—he gives it over to activists conspiring against those very urban-industrial interests. Reclaiming the mythic American wild, Abbey sequesters it from capitalist and centralized powers alike, rendering it instead a locus for an autonomous and organic community attempting to demarcate the limits of an empire that abhors limits.
First introduced, his ethno-nationalism reeks of disappointed expectations: Indeed, when next invoked, Indian politics is a joke: With such disdain for all things Indian—in an era otherwise marked by fraught Native struggles to reclaim homelands, traditional culture, and political autonomy—Abbey reveals a radical novel not quite free of the exploitative imperative it seeks to deconstruct.
As such, he leaves us with two critical questions: These questions speak to core concerns for the radical imagination in both the realm of literature and the realm of action, for the task in hand for the activist and the novelist alike is precisely to help re-conceive our scene so that it is less wasteful, less polluted, and more just. Recent scholars using the lenses of post-colonialism, decolonization, multiculturalism, and the transatlantic have read this map as purposefully transgressive: The glyph came to popular attention in nineteenth-century America when Frederick Catherwood and John Lloyd Stephens published their Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan , documenting their so-called discovery of Mayan glyph-carved ruins.
The map as glyph thus challenges the conceptual framing of the American continents, trading the constructed limit zones that would compartmentalize colonial America for the natural limits yielded by the edges of the continent s. We are here before maps or quit claims. We know where we belong here on this earth. We have always moved freely.
Imaginary minutes and hours. We recognize none of that. And we carry a great many things back and forth. We have been here and this has continued for thousands of years. No one stops us. Because no legal government could be established on stolen land. Because stolen land never had a clear title. Though Zeta here appears as the more revolutionary of the two characters, she does not flout the law the way Calabazas does: The problem with the apparatus of the modern map and the legal system it implies, as Zeta sees it, is that it blocks what Heidegger calls the way to veritas.
Silko certainly foregrounds what Abbey buries: Almanac is a story, after all, that looks back to a pre-Colombian emergence of human sacrifice and destruction in Mesoamerica on top of which European culture settles as a capstone. It is a story putting pressure on ethno-nationalism to arrive at a broader ethical question of at what cost, in terms of the human community and the natural world, do we secure survival—which in turn yields the thornier question of how much of what we have and of who we are must be exploited, exhausted, and wasted before we craft a new vision, a new way of framing and revealing the world.
Identity in the novel, ultimately, is not a theory of value foreclosing on narrative choices but grounds for challenging the technological apparatuses of an unfinished colonialism. Heise in Sense of Place, Sense of Planet ascribes to the modern environmentalist movement: Avant-garde and rear-guard at the same time, environmentalism concerned itself with issues of global citizenship and activism long before such questions became fashionable in academia.
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They indeed invoke a way of looking at the local framed by the global. In other words, if they frame the local in terms of the global, they do so in the course of imagining ways to oust the global system from intruding dangerously on the local purview. I do not doubt that this is true for certain locales, and even for an increasing number of locales, but if we discuss as Heise does societies, cultures, and places in the abstract with no obvious interest in actual particular societies, cultures, and places, we risk continuing the logic of enframing: But even this does not quite get at the issue, since what is often rejected is not the sense of planet, as such, but a particular sense of planet understood as a vehicle for modernization, industrialization, and expansion—a vehicle typically deemed unwieldy and out of control.
Liberation Movements For the 21 st Century , these and other revolutionary movements put pressure on globalization as a necessarily enduring critical category, primarily because globalization as a keyword is inextricable from a totalizing Western colonialism.
American Radical
Consequently, until we can genuinely assert a sense of the global that does not imply an exploitative economic imperative, the radical environmentalist novel rightly insists that there is good reason to resist glibly framing the local as global if it means we lose all sense of our particular places, cultures, and societies. This is especially true if the local typically affords the most fertile grounds for establishing resistance to endangering practices as it did, for instance, in the Civil Rights struggles.
Evincing a technical imagination, they self-consciously speak against enframing by offering alternative interpretations of American place, space, and habitat, intervening in and disrupting the damaging patterns into which we all box ourselves with our politics, aesthetics, and theories of value. What sets such novels apart is their capacity to re-conceive scenes of domination and exhaustion as sites of radical conflict.
So doing, they function properly as revolutionary literature: They do not merely dramatize liberationist struggles but make it possible for us to think the world, and its motives, anew. The MIT Press, Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U. Belknap Press of Harvard UP, Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination , Malden: U of California P, Harper and Row, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: That makes sense to me. See 1 question about American Radical…. Lists with This Book. During the Christmas time security commissioner Julian King noted that violent jihadists are one of the greatest threats in Europe.
Europe has faced its fair share of radical and political terror during the years, but this time the threat is global, and is targeted towards Western lifestyle, values and communities. According to GTD between and Europe has faced 2 terror attacks, of them after January Turkey has warned that a new ISIS-fighter group is arriving to Europe, Ger During the Christmas time security commissioner Julian King noted that violent jihadists are one of the greatest threats in Europe. Turkey has warned that a new ISIS-fighter group is arriving to Europe, Germany has recently been tackling through a female Islamist network, the amount of prevented terror attacks is in disheartening proportions - from lone wolves to military operative groups.
The amount of Islamic groups with potential to violence is astonishing around the globe. With the ever changing territories - radicalization does not care about the gender, it does not care about the age of the one it desires to catch, it does not care about your background and your values. It just simply takes and takes, more than it ever has in recent years. There was a time when I genuinely wanted to talk about this subject on Goodreads.
I really liked the idea of sharing the knowledge I have gained during the years, being privileged in that being able to communicate with so many experts and so many people with experience of the subject from different perspectives, being taught by them. I especially liked to highlight the importance of prevention, the ability to be 10 minutes ahead of you instead of awaiting the shit hitting the fan and then cleaning up the mess.
Unproductive and ineffective in all ways and some. So, in the spirit of prevention, what would be a better book to start with than to read an account of an Counter-terrorism undercover Muslim FBI agent? In order to defeat your enemy, you must first understand them. Tamer Elnoury and his family moved to America from Egypt when he was still a young boy.
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He was fully educated in Islam, he was fluent in Arabic and had a desire for being a cop instead of fancier careers his family always rooted for him. FBI was ready to recruit him after his graduation, but he felt the need to see how he would manage a life as a cop, on the streets instead of at a safer desk job. Elnoury spend ten years being an undercover cop pretending to be a drug dealer before landing a job in Counter-terrorism.
It is to be noted that American Radical: FBI clearly has a shortage of people who could do undercover in Counter-terrorism, a good background and knowledge is not enough, but it also requires the ability to operate in such surroundings where human lives are at stake. And the few that can do this job, are swamped with it. So was Elnoury, too. Elnoury and Chibeb came fast friends, and Chibeb grew to love Elnoury as his brother. During the operation, Elnoury had mixed feelings of Chibeb and he often wondered if he could save him from going to the wrong tracks.
I can fully understand that as even I felt bad for Chibeb at times knowing he was played on. But like Elnoury, I too got back to the reality where one goes to the route of Jihad, he is never coming back from it. Chibeb could be a caring, loyal and sensitive person - when he was not in his Jihad mode. When he was in his Jihad mode, he was ready and willing to kill in the name of Allah as many people as possible, had extremely religious views and was just a dangerous pain in everyone's ass.
Chibeb was eventually sentenced to life in prison in , but last I heard of him, he is wanting his sentence to be revalued as he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. But please do not make any mistakes of thinking he was not a full-blown Jihadist due to this - person can be a terrorist and mentally ill at the same time, these two are not mutually exclusive. Can you recognize an radicalized mind? Some do grow themselves a Jihad-beard, stop going to mosques, rant their beliefs.
Some do not grow themselves a Jihad-beard, continue to go to mosques while ranting their beliefs. Some do not rant nor do they go or stop going to mosques. Some are just like you - modern, living the life to the fullest, looking like an every day Joe with no religious signs. Some are just like you - religiously devoted, peaceful on the surface.
There is a lot of different Islamic groups with same ideologies but different focus points. How and when attacks occur depends on multiple factors, from which you get an better understanding here by reading between the lines. Recommended reading for everyone interested on the subject, but also timely as Al-Qaeda is coming back stronger than before, and they have not lost their fascination to play with their enemies trains. View all 15 comments. I am extremely interested by terrorism and wanted to use my legal background to become a part of the counter-terrorism operation in the UK, before unfortunately falling ill.
I believe we have some incredible individuals that are willing to put themselves in danger to protect their mother country and the author is just one of those doing so in America. Tamer Elnoury a pseudonym poses as an affluent Al-Qaeda sympathiser and is in a race against time to gain the terrorists' trust in order to bring I am extremely interested by terrorism and wanted to use my legal background to become a part of the counter-terrorism operation in the UK, before unfortunately falling ill.
Tamer Elnoury a pseudonym poses as an affluent Al-Qaeda sympathiser and is in a race against time to gain the terrorists' trust in order to bring them down. To infiltrate terror cells, gain detailed knowledge of their networks and bring them successfully to justice. People don't realise how difficult this job must be both physically and mentally. Guys like Elnoury put their lives in peril for the good of their country, it really is incredible.
This is an engaging read that I got through pretty quickly. It discusses some points that feed into the overall story such as the view of Islam and the strain of being an undercover agent, to name but a few. If you are interested in the use of government agents in undercover operations or how we try to protect a country's citizens from terrorists then this is not a book to be missed, in my opinion. Many thanks to Corgi for an ARC. I was not required to post a review and all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.
This is a fascinating account of life as an undercover FBI agent. Tamer Elnoury is an identity created by the FBI to expose terrorists. The identity has since been burned, so the agent, who is still active, uses it for his pseudonym. Tamer was born in Egypt and immigrated to the US as a small child, so he is natively fluent in both Arabic and English. He found his calling in law enforcement, where he worked undercover to bring down drug lords. Eventually he was recruited for counter-terrorism. The This is a fascinating account of life as an undercover FBI agent.
The book tells of a particular case that started out as a favor to Canada but grew as more evidence was found. Tamer is a very self-confident, almost cocky guy, which is essential to working under cover. Befriending jihadists was especially tiring for him—he had to watch people twist something personal and sacred to him and pretend to agree with their rationalizations for evil. Recommended for anyone interested in police work, spies, and life as an American Muslim. View all 4 comments. Nov 20, L.
Starks rated it it was amazing. Highly recommended for thriller readers, especially of the Alex Berenson series. Elnoury is a pseudonym for an actual FBI agent who went undercover. Elnoury's work led to the capture and conviction of three Canadian radicals who were preparing to kill innocents in Canada and the US in the name of their radical politics and twisted interpretations of Islam. Elnoury outlines the men and their attempts, and all it took for him not to be discovered, ending with important theological distinctions betwe Highly recommended for thriller readers, especially of the Alex Berenson series.
He also notes one telling factor in indentifying the main subject, Chiheb, as radicalized was that he had STOPPED going to mosque because he hated the moderation of his fellow congregants. The story told in this book is superb and suspenseful. It is also a welcome reminder of the men and women who put their lives on the line to keep the rest of us safe.
Dec 06, Mehrsa rated it really liked it. This book was both less and more than what I expected it to be--or maybe just different. I thought it would paint a bigger picture of the various ways in which Muslims in law enforcement were helping in counter-terrorism. But it was just one man's story. It was more exciting and "action-packed" than I thought it would be. It belongs in the genre of tough cops getting bad guys rather than any sort of wider social commentary. But it's useful even as a single story because it shows how a devout mus This book was both less and more than what I expected it to be--or maybe just different.
But it's useful even as a single story because it shows how a devout muslim confronts a radical "twisted" muslim. It was a riveting read. Apr 28, Marisa rated it really liked it Shelves: I really wasn't expecting to enjoy this as much as I did. I do wish that Elnoury had provided a little more insight into why he decided to go into law enforcement in the first place, but in general, the book is deeply insightful and almost impossible to put down. I would highly recommend the audiobook for a really immersive experience! Feb 12, Roy rated it liked it. Interesting read on this undercover agents life.
I found it pretty thrilling in some aspects however, I felt like the style made it feel a little fiction like. However the fiction style story telling lost it for me.
Not bad by any means, just wasnt what I was expecting. This review and others can be found on BW Book Reviews. In short, this is the story of an undercover agent and Tamer Elnoury is not his real name who went from busting drug rings as a police officer to being an FBI agent dealing with terrorism.
Not only was this book interesting to listen to, I really found it enlightening. Tamer, as a Muslim, spoke about how hard it was to work with and against radical Islamists since he grew up as a mainstream Muslim who grew up succeeding in the American dream. His beliefs align with the five pillars, that Islam is not a violent religion and that jihad is an internal struggle with God in order to submit. Finally, I really found it enlightening about how many plots get foiled and how.
Tamer stated that not all terrorist groups are the same. There are many opinions and they all vie for the same resources. This book, while about a very serious topic, was fun and interesting. It also had a great message of unity to it. To do that, you have to hear the voices of the mainstream and not block them out. Wauw, this is really an interesting true story. This guy is a hero. To all on Goodreads; Go and read this one!! Dec 02, Renee itsbooktalk.
This is one of those books that happened to catch my eye as it has two of my favorite buzzwords in it In short, I loved it!
Not only is it the most fascinating book I've read in a long time, it's also a very uniquely written memoir in that it reads like a page turning novel. In fact, as I mentioned in my Monday post, it very much reads like an episode of Homeland. There were times I had to remind myself the difference is that this story is actually true which in 4. There were times I had to remind myself the difference is that this story is actually true which in my opinion made it all the more terrifying.
As stated in the blurb, Tamer is a pseudonym for an undercover counterterrorism agent in the FBI. Especially when dealing with the warped and twisted minds of the radical Islamic terrorists he worked to bring down in this story. I appreciated how well he explained who these terrorists were, where they came from and how they came to believe what they do. I hung on every word as he described conversations in which the terrorists laid out detailed plans to kill as many Americans as possible The first person narrative structure of the story worked brilliantly in that I felt like I was a fly on the wall watching each scene unfold.
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The pace was steady although I will say I thought it dragged a little in the middle but the last third made up for it and I couldn't turn the pages fast enough to find out how it was all going to unfold. I love the way the authors created such a suspenseful storyline while also providing behind the scenes details of the operations. I've been recommending this book all week to people, especially to my friends who love Homeland so if you enjoy page turners that are timely, current, and so relevant to our world right now I encourage you to give this a try!
You can find all my reviews at www. Nov 05, Michel B. I hesitated a fair bit before choosing to buy this book. As it turns out, this book did the opposite and I was glad for it. The book is well written and the narrative flows exceptionally well. There are moments of humour and the story is wholly engrossing.
An interesting story, well told. I'm c I hesitated a fair bit before choosing to buy this book. I'm certain that there may have been some untold aspects that could paint the 'authorities' in a lesser light - and those were not included. But I still found it interesting and not overly propagandist. One inconsistency truly bothered me and made me question the honesty of the narrative.
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The lease on the apartment of one of the terrorists was 'up' in December or so on his Montreal flat. Which is very very odd, since Montreal and Quebec is known for it's odd custom of having the vast majority of leases due on July 1 - everybody or almost moves out at the same time here. Whilst it's common to have people move into a flat at different points in the year, the lease would most certainly have been made for the whatever remaining months until July 1 came along again.
Everybody knows this here and I found it a most peculiar part of the story and wondered what was the truth of it Jan 20, Ben Salkowe rated it it was amazing. Reading this during the vulgar immigration debate this week was a surreal experience. But the parts that most made me stop and think were his reflections on his own life and the immigrant experience in America.
We Reading this during the vulgar immigration debate this week was a surreal experience. None of that made me less patriotic. Our best defense is inclusion. But the countless other Americans in the book, with all different names and stories of their own, are all heroic reminders of what makes his work possible. And each is a reminder of the common beliefs and goodness we all share.
I only wish our leaders who spent this week arguing over who to exclude from our country, would understand these stories, too. I really enjoyed this book. It is a quick read and the agent did America a huge favor. I heard an interview with the author on a podcast a few months ago and the story sounded really interesting, so I was pretty excited to read this book. To be honest though, it was a big let down compared to my expectations for a few reasons.
First off, it is very apparent that the author is a special agent and former cop, not a writer. It is not well written at all and some points he wants to make get repetitive. I also came to question how effective a lot of their approach is in actually preven I heard an interview with the author on a podcast a few months ago and the story sounded really interesting, so I was pretty excited to read this book.
I also came to question how effective a lot of their approach is in actually preventing terrorism. From my perspective reading his account, all of the people who end up arrested seem to be hot-heads who like to talk about jihad but would never have the human or financial resources to carry out an attack. Then the FBI comes in and offers them a financier and gives them all of these resources to plan an attack and help with recruiting others. Sure their ideology is deplorable and they most certainly should be closely monitored by the intelligence agencies, but in my reading I'm not so convinced they committed any crimes before the FBI came in and started helping facilitate things.
It just seems like a waste of resources as they blow through so much money on this operation. I'd be curious to know whether they do this same type of work on white nationalists or others with insane ideologies.