Rate this book

The Spiders Of Allah: Travels Of An Unbeliever On The Frontline Of Holy War (2009)

by James Hider(Favorite Author)

3.75 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0312565852 (ISBN13: 9780312565855)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

St. Martin's Griffin

review 1: James Hider's Spiders of Allah is one of those books that could only be written by someone who has been there. I've spent quite a bit of time in the Middle East and Mr. Hider captures the surrealism of the place in a book hilarious, well told, and at time sobering. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to get a feel for the Middle East that lies behind the headlines, and the mentalities that drive them.
review 2: Picked this up for a few pence at a lost property sale and didn't expect much of it. It turned out to be an interesting read and a bit different in perspective from some of the other stuff I've read on the conflicts covered. Hider provides what feels to be a pretty honest gut based retelling of his time in the "religious" war zones from a position hi... moreghly critical of the role of fundamentalist religion, and religion in general, in peoples lives. You get a harrowing picture of lives lost to blinkered fanaticism that drains the life from practitioners and coerces others on pain of death into the same brainlessness. At the same time there is a glimpse of the cynical use of religious fundamentalism in the settling of score and the familiar profit motive. I was once again struck by how the lack of access to information and encouragement to free thinking has created generations who are little more than fodder for blind obedience to creeds that do not allow questioning be those ancient or contemporary (something Hider never really touches on but perhaps it's too obvious). Reading the book yet again you get a sense of just how out of touch with reality the US was when it decided to wade into its latest bloody crusade and the feeling is once again reinforced that this was more a religiously inspired adventure than a planned military operation by the worlds foremost military power "God is on our side, they are evil doers, the USA will triumph as it is the avenging angel chosen by God to free the world of terrorists" etc. Hider recalls GW Bush and his conversations with a God who gives him his marching orders. The book is a graphic record of the decent into utter madness of a country torn apart and its people mangled and murdered for decades. Towards the end of the book Hider gets more philosophical and I think effectively makes his point which will be as lost now as it has been for centuries. We are all the same meat machines. We live, we die. Along the way we are recruited, beaten, terrorised by the evolving grey matter that has made us the complex creatures we are and which seems to have created within us a predisposition for flights of deadly fantasy. Hider chronicles a brief moment in the history of human madness that is and probably always will be with us however much the sane and enlightened rail against it. less

Download links for: The Spiders of Allah: Travels of an Unbeliever on the Frontline of Holy War

Advertising