Customer Reviews

Scarecrow

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When, on page 219, he brings together all the images you've overlooked while you were too busy involved in the great story and storytelling, this book astounds you. You start going back through the book and realizing it's been there all along, in the religious images, the images of greed, the images of things that throw off gigantic shadows but really aren't that big, and of course, the Scarecrow. It's the answer. It has to be, if we're going to survive. Then you continue on to the end and you get the chills because we haven't figured it out and probably never will.

I'm an avid reader, but I don't make pretentions to be as intensely well educated as Jabanoski is. The amazing thing about this though is that you don't have to be some great student of literature at all to get it. All you have to do is read this book with an open heart and a desire to see the world be a better place.

I just bought the book yesterday and finished it today. This book is written by Bill Jabanoski who has heroically went all over the world, from Central America, to Beirut, Africa and beyond to uncover important stories of our destructive foreign policy.

What is interesting is that in Central America (when we were funding the Contras in Nicaragua and the death squads in El Salvador who killed thousands of innocent people) Jabanoski writes everything he sees, yet only 25% of the information - the sugar coated "we are the good guys" news is sent back.

Here are some tidbits from the book, which I highlighted, which I think are very important:

1. 5,000 kids die everyday in Africa, mostly from preventable diseases such as malaria. We would only have to increase pennies for every hundred dollars of our money to provide those kids with medicine. However, I suppose, providing kids with medicines isn't "as cool as" throwing bombs on people and shooting at them non-discriminately as we are doing in Iraq.

2. When Jabanoski gets into the second part of the book, which is about Iraq, he not only blames politicians, the media and greedy corporations, he gives the American people a well-deserved chiding. While we sit here in our SUVs or worry about our kids, we couldn't care less that there are kids of a different skin color who follow a different religion dying in Iraq. Or the fact that their sewer system is messed up and they barely have any electricity.

3. "Some people don't thing about other people as one of theirs or one of ours. They only see people, just like themselves.

4. Americans need the strongest army in the world, because we have, individually, become the weakest willed people I know of.

5. This is from an Iraqi interpreter Bill meets:

"But now we have reduced ourselves to a realm ruled by the self-serving rich, such as the Saudis, or self-serving fanatics, all of whom use the Koran like a weapon to keep the common people from thinking any further than what the Mullahs tell them to think, just as your country has falled into the hands of the same type of people, only, from what I read, they do not waive the Bible in front of your people so much as they do your flag.

Again, this is from the same interpreter, Ahmed:

" When the Eleven-September attacks were made on your nation two years ago, we Shiites, we cried for your people. Most of the world cried for your people. Tell me, who cries for my people now? Even though there are most likely ten times more of them killed by your armies than died in the Eleven-September attacks? Does anyone in your country even care about this?

Read this book if you haven't already. Second - DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Innocent Iraqis and soldiers are being killed or injured while we are sitting here. For the self-serving ones who couldn't care less - think of it like this, the Iraq war has increased the number of terrorists ten-fold; normal Joes or Ahmeds have turned into terrorists like anybody would if they saw their families die. So try to stop this war, if not for anyone else's sake, for your own.

As a reviewer before me has already noted, when, on page 219, all of the seemingly incidental things we all ignore and never connect together suddenly all hit you at once, it was, to me, the single greatest moment of epiphany I've ever experienced in all the books I've ever read.

This is the single most important political document of our time, a damnation of the Bush administration and, probably more importantly, the American elite that control the hearts and minds of average Americans by fueling hate by fueling their fears.

However, to call it simply that would be doing Mr. Jabanoski a great disservice. He does not only offer protest and indignation. He provides an escape route for all of us although he, and I must reluctantly agree, doubts that we will ever choose to take it.

Then there is simply the mastery of great writing. Simply stated, if you believe "The Da Vinci Code" was a fascinating read, which it was, this book is a dozen times more fascinating, a hundred times better written, and a thousand times more important.

I'm not a great writer like Jabanoski, so I can't even BEGIN to describe how much of a masterpiece this is. All I know is that it's the BEST novel I've EVER read.
The story lines, the blizzard he lived through as a young man, reporting from the war in Iraq 25 years later, the always present image of the scarecrow, are always fascinating from page one. But when they all come together, it's like someone hit you with a sledge hammer and FINALLY woke you up. This is a VERY political, Anti-Bush and Anti-War novel. But it's more than JUST that. It's an explanation of what is WRONG with the American psyche and the world's that we keep killing each other instead of SAVING each other and OURSELVES at the same time, and it offers a WAY OUT!!!!!!! All I can say is that if I you read ONE book this year or in your entire life, read THIS ONE.

[...]. After all, everyone is entitled to their opinion, although the only thing I think you are right about Chris B. is what a genius of a writer Jabanoski is and how stunningly well-written this novel is. Otherwise, you've missed the point entirely.
As for it being "depressing," did Jabanoski or his publisher somehow misrepresent what this novel is about before you bought it? I don't think so. It is about the War in Iraq, where we have lost almost one and one half thousand of our soldiers and killed who knows how many Iraqi civilians. What did you expect it to be? Funny? As for it making it "as though all the good guys are actually bad guys," Jabanoski is incredibly sympathetic to our soldiers. The only people he makes out to be "bad guys" ARE bad guys -- people like Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney.
Finally, as for it offering "little on how to fix what he believes is broken," you obviously did not even understand the novel you chose to review or even understand why it is called "Scarecrow." I'm not trying to be insulting, but that is the problem with people like yourself who Bush and Cheney lead around. You don't think things through, but only kneejerk react anyway you're told to, to things you obviously don't understand.
This novel is stunning. Yes, it is sad and depressing, but so is the war. Jabanoski is just trying to let us know how we got fooled into getting into this in the first place and how not to get fooled again. Most of all, he is trying to bring our soldiers home. Isn't that something we should all want?

The reviewers before me are absolutely correct. This novel leaves you breathless. Two related plots, placed a quarter of a century apart, the terror of Iraq told eloquently, brutally and truthfully from every point of view, the atrocious atrocities in the name of religion and nationalism warped by fanatics, a reporter's eye for how "President" George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden caused this to be, and a chilling, what should be obvious revelation about humanity and how we can save our children from the "Storm beyond your or my imagining" which is coming, all in less than three hundred pages. This man is a genius. What is more, he is a very brave genius.

I probably titled this review wrong because while this novel does blow you away, it can also bring you back to life if you have the heart and brain to understand it. It's incredible how someone can write two different fascinating, connected, page turning stories in the same novel, and at the same time, before you even realize it, make such awe inspiring statements about religion, sick patriotism and nationalism, and the sickness of fear and the resulting hate that control most of us and our outlook on life and each other. I'm not saying that this novel has all the answers, but if you're looking for a place to start understanding why most of us "live lives of quiet desperation (Thoreau)," why we keep murdering people in the name of patriotism and religion, and why we need to buy every new S.U.V. or whatever else we see on television thinking it will make us happy even though it never does, read this. It will take you a long way to understanding. It did for me.

I just finished reading this book an hour ago and I'm still in tears while I type this. I'm not sure whether they're tears of compasssion for our poor soldiers in Iraq, or tears for the Iraq people Bush has slaughtered, or for my country, or for my daughter, Susan, who's only ten years old. I think it's a combination of all of them. All I can type here is READ THIS BOOK. Our soldiers and our childrens lives can be saved from what it has to say if we could, in Jabanoski's words "just learn the simple lessons" it would take to save them.

the people that need to read this book,will not,and if they did they just wouldnt get it.the people that do read it are already getting it.Parents it is time to open your hearts and eyes and look at the disaster you are willingly creating for your children and grandchildren.

Very informative and good information from someone who apparently has nothing to gain by speaking the truth to the American public. He definitely does a good job of putting the ignorant people in their place in this book however, the true sad part is the majority of the people that need to read this book are too busy glued to their mundane robot lifestyles that they will never see the true errors of ways.