So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All the Wrong Places by Elinor Burkett

So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All the Wrong Places Reviews

• 
  Magdelanye

  
  The good guys and the bad guys trade roles so facilely that history becomes a mix and match ensemble that can be endlessly rewritten....The past can be turned to many uses....history has always been a cynical political game in which all sides pretend that only others mangle the truth. Selectivity becomes reality because zealots and power mongers call the shots, and all the "ordinary people" swallow.... p299
  
  Not many people would consider arranging a Fullbright scholarship to teach journalism in a remote and unknown country, to be part of a grander bucket list. Not many would submit to the kind of life-style and risks this entails or take their curiosity about the Other to such wild extremes. And I believe that not many women have such a terrific, compatible partner in adventure. her intrepid husband Dennis. EB is one tough cookie! I can only sigh with jealousy at their efficient team spirit.
  
  In the classroom with her woefully inhibited students, EB practices a marvellous balance between discipline and candour. Her sense of humour and her willingness to learn the truth of a situation and to explore "the chasm between what we were reading in the American media and what we were doing." p282 along with her exploration of the neighbouring countries make this a fascinating and relevant book.
  
  But how do you respect local traditions when you're a journalism professor and those traditions include censorship, self-censorship and pretty straightforward journalistic dishonesty? p36
  
  Who told you that we wanted freedom? What kind of freedom is this? The freedom to starve? p55
• 
  Stacy

  ✔️Kyrgyzstan
  ✔️Tajikistan
  ✔️Afghanistan
  ✔️Iran
  ✔️Uzbekistan
  ✔️Turkmenistan
  ✔️Iraq
  
  This book was so much more than I bargained for. A fascinating sometimes brusque glimpse of the Stans from an outsider. In my reading the world project, I’ve placed weighted value on a book written by an author from each particular country—but in this case I made an exception; Burkett’s outsider view is absolutely unvarnished and eye opening. Her travel escapades to places she calls her ‘map of malevolence’ are daring and inquisitive, and she unveils customs, traditions, and paradigms that astonished me—most especially where women are concerned. It made me think that perhaps sometimes there’s a benefit to an outsider’s view in order to get a broader picture unembellished by the conceit of patriotism. Burkett makes an important and thought provoking admission; “If I had learned one thing during my year of travels, it is was that tradition wasn’t just quaintly benign...”
  
  She gives us a first hand view of the fracture of the Soviet Union which, viewed from far away seemed full of possibility and promise, but at closer inspection through Burkett’s lens, it shows the seemingly insurmountable challenges that kind of seismic shift produces. Her comparison even more jarring—“only by imagining how I would feel if every major American corporation fell into simultaneous bankruptcy, the states ceased to be united and every penny I’d put away toward retirement couldn’t sustain me for a month.”
  
  I was also overcome with the notion I’ve felt for a long time, convinced that the more you visit or live in other places the more you feel out of place at “home”, as if you’re always straddling several places without a sure footing in any culture. The peril of travel is that you risk the possibility that home will always have a foreign tinge to it.
  
  My favorite quote echoed a sentiment I once relished from an Australian traveler who I met while braving Komodo Island looking for its legendary dragons—his comment to me that day mirrored Burkett’s sentiments exactly:
  “We dismissed Western Europe out of hand, Rome and Madrid feeling too tame...We joked that we were saving the first world for our old age, when we would need reliable hot water, mattress without lumps, and food fried in oil no more than a week old.”
  
  Here’s to traveling to all the wrong places and seismic paradigm shifts.
• 
  Ann Woodbury Moore

  From a journal entry, dated 4/25/04:
  ... a very interesting book about living in Central Asia in 2001-02. It's a strong indictment of communism, esp. as practiced by Russia & its satellites, & the ensuing lack of liberty/initiative among citizens who expected the state to care for them with no or minimal effort on their part. Even 10 years after Russia's breakup, former republics still have passive, apathetic citizens who want to be told what to do & helped along every inch of the way. It was also an indictment of dictators, in varying guises, who rule countries like their own fiefdoms with varying degrees of corruption & ineptness. The author really lambasted "tradition" & how traditions often keep the people from progressing & result in physical, social, & intellectual deprivations & hardships. She also wasn't very flattering about the bureaucracies & lack of technological know-how in the former Soviet empire. From someone who'd be considered a liberal by most Americans, the book ended up being a strong endorsement of the U.S.A.!
• 
  Niyati Tamaskar

  I enjoyed learning about a part of the world I don't know much about, "The Stans". I was fascinated by the chapter on Turkmenistan and their leader Niyazov, otherwise known as "Turkmenbashi". I feel better educated on Central Asia after reading this book. I liked how hard Burkett tries to educate her students on journalism, she encourages them to ask questions, investigate and report the facts.
  In parts of the book Burkett comes off as opinionated with a 'US hasn't done anything wrong' attitude. I wished she shared more of a journalistic view. The complaining about food, and how 'grey' Bishkek seemed to her was tiresome.
• 
  Andy Plonka

  What an revealing book re education in the Former states of the USSR some years after the "independence". The author, a journalist, was not only brave enough to spend more than a year on Kyrgyzstan where Americans were not exactly greeted with open arms. She taught a course in Journalism to students who aspired to be journalists in a country where journalism has a much different meaning than it does in the US even though she was pressured by other faculty members to accept work which she deemed unworthy for the standards of her course.
• 
  Kristy

  2.5
  
  The author came across as culturally insensitive. My favorite parts were when she was traveling outside of Kyrgyzstan instead of trying to force her views on her students.
• 
  Mark Sequeira

  Okay, I like this book. Of course, I've lived and visited every one of these 'Stans in some way or other. That leads to my first recommendation. Put down the book and buy a plane ticket BEFORE you begin reading. Otherwise you may end up daunted and never actually attempt the trip (at least to these types of destinations) and that would be a tragedy. In fact, you may end up as one of those she talks about in the final chapter that speak about other places and events without any 'real' knowledge from having been there and shared in some of the suffering, struggle, daily life, sheep's eyeball or ear, etc. So this book is a tribute to those who have been, and read, and laugh (or cry) and shake their heads and read portions to their significant other about the illogic and backwardness and other 'otherness' that makes for living overseas in the former Soviet Union and beyond.
  
  
  
  My second thought is also from her last chapter. About travel and understanding and the 'cost' of knowing, which is going, investing, living, laughing, suffering among another people/culture. Without that investment we will always be tourists snapping pictures of things we may or may not understand.
  
  And we can better appreciate a character like Jesus (apart from any particular system of belief) who came, not as ruler (even a Roman or Jewish ruler) or president or privileged American removed from the world's suffering but as a simple peasant who lived, laughed ate and suffered with ordinary poor peasants and then didn't buy into the revolutionary uprising of the Macabees or Maoists but taught local people how to love and how to overcome and how to forgive each other (because in humble village life you need that).
  
  
  
  So I get it. Travel can be 'incarnation' if you take the time, even if you never really fully feel as you 'get it' or it can be 'ohhs' and 'ahhs' and the artificial sound of a digital camera's shutter. I've always liked going to a place and staying there for a time versus hopping from place to place with no real connection. I think Ms. Burnett feels the same. And while she feels miffed after 9-11 by the hordes of Europeans and their anti-Americanism, I can only remark that being a 'tourist' is not only an American past-time and I assume Europeans living overseas (in America or Kyrgyzstan) might have a more nuanced point of view. Here's hoping anyway. And hopefully this book will help us all appreciate our own condition/culture as well as have a fully, more sympathetic view of others'.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Michael

  Published in 2004, this is a first person narrative of the author's time as a Fulbright professor teaching in Kyrgyzstan in 2001-2002 - arriving right after 9/11.
  
  Burkett does an amusing job of describing her efforts to teach journalism to students who are still living in what amounts to a derivative Soviet totalitarian state. She also describes what it was like living in this part of the world at this time.
  
  She also describes visits to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, China, Vietnam in varying levels of detail. I particularly liked the chapter about her visit to Turkmenistan under the crazy leader Niyazov, otherwise known as "Turkmenbashi" (or "leader of the Turkmen people").
  
  A theme is that when she spoke to groups, there was a continuing contradiction between complaints about the United States interfering in various ways and requests that the United States do something about some particular problem - and an inability to see the contradiction between these two points of view.
• 
  Julie

  Around 9/11/01, historian and journalism professor Elinor Burkett spent a year teaching in Kyrgyzstan and traveling to regional hotspots, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran with her intrepid (and patient) husband.
  Her observations of these cultures are straightforward, sometimes brutally so. Many times, I was uncomfortable reading what sounded more like complaints (especially about the Kyrgyzstan food and the fatalistic attitude of her students) than objective reportage.
  I'm not suggesting she should have glossed over her honest reactions. This is a memoir, not a newspaper article. It is one person's response to particular people, places and situations. I appreciated this book and the window it opened to another world, one I'm unlikely to visit. I just might have liked a little more nuance, perhaps a slightly more open and appreciate spirit of adventure, and a more complete sense of the book's most significant characters as real people rather than as examples of a point she's making.
• 
  Alice Jun

  Fantastic book. Wonderfully insightful. I know pretty much nothing about all of the countries Burkett travelled to, despite having travelled to a couple of the Asian countries towards the end. I really appreciate her ability to depict an entire country through a well-written metaphor, to portray the characteristics of an entire society through a couple of examples. Of course, I understand this is only one person's POV and that much of what she wrote are generalizations, but to be fair, to accurately describe an entire society or country is a heroic if not impossible feat. This was great for a first look through a newbie's eyes of foreign cultures and their attitudes towards the U.S. She packs in a lot of historical, political, and religious tidbits as well. Not quite a 5-star because I found some of the sentences confusing to read. I think some of the sentences could have been shortened a bit. This could just be me, of course, and I often use long sentences in my own writing, especially when I'm trying to describe something very complex.
• 
  Callie

  I loved this book and highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in Central Asia. The book describes a year-in-the-life of a journalist and her husband who went to live in Kyrgyzstan. During that time they traveled throughout the region, visiting places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, China, Russia, Uzbekistan, and more.
  
  Her characterization of the people and the places she visited was so accurate. I lived 5 years in Central Asia and felt that she was taking the memories straight out of my head! Even for those with less interest in the region, her analysis of international attitudes was very eye-opening. At times she seemed a bit strident, but it was easy for me to overlook that and to wish that I'd been able to debate so intelligently when faced with the same questions and comments over the years there.
  
• 
  Dona

  I wish I could say I loved this book, but truthfully I'm glad to be finished with it. I tried again and again and again to really get into it, but every time I tried to sit down with it for any length of time I found my mind wandered as I quickly became bored with the infliction of some of the author's own political views and the excruciating details or sidebars that, in my mind, derailed my interest and interrupted the flow. I found the book came around for me as I got to the final 50-60 pages and if the entire book had read like and been as thoughtful as these pages I think I may have enjoyed it more. I am glad that I stuck with it and finished it (I feel it was more of an accomplishment than a pleasure), but it is not one that I will recommend widely.
• 
  Claire

  Elinor wants to take a break from exhausting, hard hitting journalism so she decides to 'slack off' as a Fulbright Professor teaching journalism in Kyrgyzstan. She describes the nutty trials and tribulations of sharing freedom of the press, independent thought, and journalistic tenets to the students in her college who daily cope with the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a blink a huge news story, oh and an opportunity for dangerous travel erupts practically next door- 9/11 and the Afghanistan invasion occur with an opportunity to witness the crisis first hand. This chilling story of the mid east just before Shock and Awe is very informative and chilling. I am glad I read this book I learned a lot about the mid east and post communist countries.
• 
  Nina Fitzgerald

  Not only a travel book but so much more. I had never heard of Elinor Burkett but now I want to read everything she's written. She begins a yearlong odyssey as a Fulbright scholar teaching journalism in Kyrgyzstan, a fading central Asia remnant of the disintegrated Soviet Union. Far from the comforts of her American home during the time of Sept, 11, 2001, she and her husband journey to Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Mongolia, China, and Vietnam. As an American journalist she confronts her own fantasies, prejudices, projections and presumptions, long taken for knowing the world. We learn something about that which is all but unknowable unless we willingly step out of our own comfortable preconceptions.
• 
  Frederick Bingham

  This writer spent a year living in Kyrgystan, in the capital Bishkek as a Fulbright scholar. She happened to be over there during the '2001-'2002 academic year, when 9/11 happened. She records her observations of the society, how it reacts to 9/11, what it is like to be a journalist in the former Soviet Union. She makes a number of trips during her stay, to Iraq, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Burma, and some other places. She records her observations of the cultures and her interactions with the people. Despite the poor reputation the US has among Muslims, she found herself very much welcomed in Central Asia.
• 
  Heidi

  I don't remember how I stumbled upon this book, but I am happy I did! Most Americans can remember where they were on Sept. 11, 2011. Burkett just happened to be in Kyrgyzstan teaching journalism. She refused to come back to the states and instead was able to experience the post 9/11 world not only in Kyrgyzstan but also in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her experiences and stories are a wonderful view into how different cultures reacted to America during that time.
• 
  JodiP

  My view of this book is a bit tainted because of Burkett's later behavior at the Oscars, which I only found out by looking her up after I read the book. However, I loved it--it's about a part of the world I had very little understanding of, and it was just pre-911, so it was intriguing to read about the world before then. She's a good raconteur, that is certain.
• 
  Melissa Cavanaugh

  This account of a journalist who took a fellowship teaching in Central Asia would probably have been great no matter when she went, but the fact that she was there on 9/11 made this especially fascinating - even after almost a decade.
• 
  Maureen

  A book with great promise, but I came to feel the author just wanted to get the hell out of Dodge and get a book contract in the process. I'm sure she had tremendous hardships but still...and yes, I've been to and lived in that part of the world.
• 
  Tammy

  Author traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan, ect.. She writes about her experiences and the people she meets and their way of life. Enjoyable and yet surprising of their views of our country. It was interesting.
• 
  Jenny

  Interesting narrative about an American woman doing a Fulbright teaching project in post-9/11 Central Asia.
• 
  Brooke

  If you like to travel and have a penchant for dictator art, this is your book!
• 
  Mecca

  One of my favorites for the year.