A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb by Amitava Kumar

A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb Reviews

• 
  Sorayya Khan

  Amazing, but excruciatingly painful book to read. More than anything I have read lately, Amitava Kumar describes for us the surreal world we've come to inhabit in the last decade. I loved a sentence toward the end of the book where he says: "So, here's my generalization: a stereotype scripts the story of people's lives in a thousand defeating ways, and we owe it to all our social selves to produce new stories, with many exits, U-turns, detours, and destinations." While the quote speaks to stereotypes, it also speaks to the role of fiction--we owe it to ourselves to produce new stories and open windows as yet tightly closed.
• 
  Murtaza

  This is an exceptionally engaging and well-written book about the War on Terror, juxtaposing "counterterrorism" in India with the United States, with segues into some of the cultural responses to the post-9/11 era of permanent warfare. There are detailed examinations of several sting operations against young Muslim men in America, powerfully documented. I appreciated this particularly, as it helps sift through the mess of broken lives created by the American response to 9/11, and which are still being created. The book is very moving in its descriptions of what becomes of those accused of "terrorism", whether spuriously or not. It ends on a note about the true crime, hidden behind the noise and motion of the machinery of state, the industrial scale terror being inflicted on people in places like Iraq.
• 
  Bigsna

  With 56 ratings and just 9 reviews, maybe there's a reason I couldn't get through this book. It's the title and the subject matter that caught my interest, and it started off pretty well too - but eventually my interest petered. I don't even remember anymore what made me put it down and never pick it up again. Clearly my attempts at trying out unusual books seem to be failing royally :-P
• 
  Gel

  Indian-born literature professor Amitava Kumar shines an insistent light on events of the last decade that, for the most part, are easier and less painful to simply forget. Focusing on the criminal process of terror from identifying suspects to interrogations through their trials, he does an excellent job of painting a complex picture of people swept up as suspects in the global war on terror. Some of the stories are of innocent bystanders being tortured, even sentenced to death before being acquitted upon appeal. More often (in the case of Americans), the suspects have been lured into planning and sharing elaborate schemes with government informants sent into mosques throughout the US from late 2001; the roles of the informants lurk near the borders of entrapment, hanging on a judge's interpretation of their actions.
  
  The picture that emerges from these is not the criminal masterminds the prosecution attempts to paint for us, but rather of bumbling, opportunistic, even materialistic immigrants attempting to bluster their way into positions of importance. In this regard, as Kumar shows, they are not entirely different from the informants. Indeed, a glance at the list of more prominent terror suspects (even those not coaxed into action by government employees) shows more comedic bumbling than anything else. For some reason it seems generally frowned upon to regard these failed terrorists as bumblers and their successes as a rare bit of luck, but Kumar is unrelenting in examples.
  
  The goal of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of his Arm a Tiny Bomb is not to garner sympathy for accused terrorists; though, certainly we feel for the Kashmiri Muslim who is picked off a bus based on a misinterpreted, vague telephone conversation while trying to deliver his PhD dissertation to the printer's, tortured and imprisoned for weeks in India until it's finally determined that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the terror attack, and then finally set free but never given back that dissertation. (Well, at least former grad students will feel sympathy for him) The book doesn't come through as a specific indictment of torture, or overly broad surveillance, or of trying to convict people with too little evidence, though. I'm unsure what policy changes Kumar would recommend. After all, he's a literature professor. He studies culture, and teaches about the documents and literature of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. It is, however, a thought-provoking, powerful work, and while it may not provide answers, it does a good job of raising the questions: How many false positives are acceptable in identifying terrorists? What exactly is entrapment, and what is the role of professional informants? How can accused would-be terrorists get effective legal counsel and a fair trial?
• 
  Jacob Wren

  Amitava Kumar writes:
  
  "I must have been in my late teens when I first read Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory, about the “whisky priest” who is being hunted by a determined police lieutenant during the era of anticlerical violence in Mexico. The priest is a marvel of flawed humanity. He is an alcoholic and has fathered an illegitimate child, but even as he flees the fanatical power that pursues him he gives succor to those who come to him in the dark for a blessing or a mass. In the end, he is caught and executed. I cannot remember now whether I understood much of the novel or the curious search for human redemption that lies at its heart. But there was a line that the priest offered that has always stayed with me: “Hate was just a failure of the imagination.” When I went looking for those lines again, I found that they occur in the context of the priest trying to imagine a face, and inevitably finding evidence of grace: “He couldn’t see her in the darkness but there were plenty of faces he could remember from the old days which fitted the voice. When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of the imagination.” While reading those lines now, I recognize it as a writer’s vision, a vision fuels by the believe that detail and voice, and all that we think of as face, would deliver the whole human to you, and behind that, the whole of humanity. It is a belief that, from a writer’s viewpoint, is oddly narcissistic. And yet filled with the supreme humility – there is a complete absence of hierarchy and also the absence of judgment, there is no distinction drawn between the high and the low, the good or bad."
• 
  Tara Bhatnagar

  ‘Hate was just a failure of imagination.’
  
  This quote from Graham Greene’s novel ‘The Power and the Glory’ is the base sentiment in Amitava Kumar’s ‘A Foreigner Carrying in the crook of his Arm a Tiny Bomb’ which he goes onto explore in vivid detail, using the art, films and literature of our time. Following the 9/11 attack, Kumar attempts to explain the seeds of hate and suspicion, especially with regard to the Muslim community, that have spread across the world.
  
  The book is a concise documentation of all information that’s in the public eye and everything that is not. For a person baffled by the growing fractures in a secular democracy like India today, Kumar’s research puts everything in perspective. He wants you to question the narrative that America has worked hard to manufacture when they declared their ‘War on Terror’; he wants you to know that resisting any government in power or their atrocities could be harmful to you as a citizen of the world.
  
  Another quote he finds in a bar, that he uses to drive his point home is: “War Is Terrorism With A Bigger Budget”. Governments across the globe have used the fear of the people as an excuse to detain and horrendously torture millions of innocent people, curbing their individual freedom, making examples of them. The terrorist lives more vividly in our heads than on our streets, burned into our conscience via the vaguely specific WANTED posters our security forces plaster everywhere. We know what bad looks like, but do we really know anything?
  
  We never hold governments responsible for fuelling extremism until it’s too late and this book is a hard reminder of that. From America to India, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib to Papa 2 in Kashmir, this book is Amitava Kumar’s examination of humanity.
  
• 
  Eric

  Intense read. Really great discussion of the war on terror, what it means, and how it has changed what we care about and what we can willfully ignore. Recommended. Plus, the title of this book is AMAZING.
• 
  Duke Press

  “Kumar’s searching and humane account of the global consequences of the U.S. ‘war on terror’ gets behind the rhetoric and state public relations campaigns in a brisk but thoughtful narrative. . . . An arresting and heartrending work of public protest and valuable social analysis, this work contributes forcefully to a subtle, human-scaled accounting of 21st-century geopolitics.”--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
  
  “[A:] perceptive and soulful . . . meditation on the global war on terror and its cultural and human repercussions. . . . A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb carries in the crook of its own arm Mr. Kumar’s plaintive appeal. If we’re to bridge the perilous divide that separates us from those poor and unnamed people who resent us, we first need to see them, to look into their eyes. We need, Mr. Kumar writes, 'to acknowledge that they exist.' This angry and artful book is a first step."--Dwight Garner, New York Times
  
  “After you read [A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb:], you will never look at the global war on terror in the same way again. You will, also, finally know how to look at the war on terror, especially as it is fought here. . . . [S:]tunningly researched, brilliantly thoughtful, boldly imagined and courageously executed. I can't think of a more urgent, important and necessary book for us this year. You should rush to read it.”--Pradeep Sebastian, The Hindu (review of the Indian edition)
  
  “Kumar's study (think Jane Mayer's The Dark Side meets Coco Fusco's protest art) reveals how deeply the figure of the ‘terrorist’ has seeped into our imaginations by brilliantly synthesizing straight reportage—on the Mumbai blasts and the trials of two putative terrorists in New York—and contemporary conceptual art's responses to “’he war on terror.’“--Parul Sehgal, Publishers Weekly, “Staff Picks”
  
  “A disturbing look, in a somewhat meandering but consistently engaging tour, at part of the 'war on terror', in the US and abroad, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of his Arm a Tiny Bomb is a useful reminder of how wrong things have gone (and continue to go wrong) and if only in making readers aware of some of these issues already serves a useful purpose.”--M.A.Orthofer, The Complete Review
  
  “More than a piece of reportage, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb illuminates the dangers to civil liberties from extraordinary governmental powers and torture’s questionable effectiveness. . . . Whatever one’s views on 9/11 and its accompanying legal changes, the use of torture, or the war on terror, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb is a worthwhile read. Kumar’s perspective is one not often seen in American writings on similar subjects. That alone would recommend the book; the high quality of the writing should secure its place on any library shelf.”--J. G. Stinson, ForeWord
  
  
• 
  Sabina Himani

  "Such luck, such sorrow. In the end, this is what it comes down to: who will teach one to be modern, who will teach the other to be human?"
  These words pretty much expressed the soul of the book for me.
  It is not an easy read. Very painful at times. But it tells it like it is, no exaggeration, no drama ( this is what like most about Amitava Kumar's writing ) and yet, gets you in the gut. Lot of food for thought. I would highly recommend it.
• 
  dead letter office

  sarah w