Word: klaus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...elite, educated, and well-connected youth with a social conscience, the impulse is to use the power of education for good. Ian R. Klaus, a graduate student in history at Harvard, arrived with his “feet on the ground, head in the sky” in Iraq in 2005, two years after the U.S. invasion, to teach English literature and American history in the country’s Kurdistan region...
...Klaus left for Iraq fresh from a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford and “Elvis Is Titanic” reflects his intellectual bent. The early chapters of the books are couched in the historic intellectual debate over Western involvement in the Middle East, as he cites everyone from T.S. Eliot to Noam Chomsky to the “9/11 Commission Report...
...Later in the book, when Klaus spins his experience teaching Ernest Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea” into a lesson in cultural relativism, his book smarts are forced onto the reader—but in the early historical analysis, they orient rather than irritate...
...While Klaus highlights the ambiguities of the U.S. presence in Iraq, he is even more painfully aware of the chance that his own presence there could do more damage than good. Is it imperialist, he asks, to be trying to spread the English language and American history during an American military campaign? Firmly committed to presenting an unbiased history of the U.S., he emphasizes the African-American experience of slavery and the struggle for civil rights. Yet Klaus also finds himself often defending the contemporary United States—and himself—against his students’ perceptions...
...Ultimately, his status as a target forces his early departure. As it turns out, Klaus is not your ordinary American in Iraq—at the time the book place, was Chelsea Clinton’s boyfriend...