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

#257
Title: So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All the Wrong Places
Author: Elinor Burkett
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Year: 2004/2005
334 pages

Burkett's chronicle of her Fulbright year teaching journalism in Kyrgyzstan, with regional peregrinations, rebuts easy criticisms of the United States' behavior in the region. I appreciated this perspective, while at times finding Burkett a little jingoistic. Most tellingly, I am hard-pressed to remember any positive appraisal from her of this region's politics, governance, or infrastructure. Therefore, read with some skepticism; it is too easy an analysis for the U.S. to be basically helpful and put-upon and the former soviet to be inefficient and oppressive.