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The Face of the Tiger | 
 enlarge | Author: Mark Steyn
Publisher: Stockade Books
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $15.00
You Save: $4.95 (25%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 307130
Media: Paperback
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0973157003
EAN: 9780973157000
ASIN: 0973157003
Publication Date: November 1, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In this collection of essays, Mark Steyn considers the world since September 11th - war and peace, quagmires and root causes, new realities and indestructible myths. Incisive and witty as ever, Steyn takes on "the brutal Afghan winter", the "axels of evil", the death of Osama bin Laden and much more from the first phase of an extraordinary new war.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 A trip back to the dawn of the War On Terror October 22, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book is essentially an anthology of Steyn's columns dating back to 9-11.
What is accomplished in this collection is reminding the reader of the thoughts and mis-conceptions that abounded in those frantic and uncertain days following the greatest incident of terrorism to reach U.S. shores.
Steyn is, as always, witty and insightful. It makes for an interesting read and will almost certainly leave the reader with new perspectives that may have, at best, been covered up by the passing of time.
 Read This Next, After Reading Mark Steyn's Bestselling AMERICA ALONE! August 29, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The title of this compilation book, THE FACE OF THE TIGER, by Mark Steyn, comes from his February 25, 2002 entry which starts with a limerick:
"There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger.
The smile on the face of the tiger is the video recording of the death of Daniel Pearl." (p. 185).
Steyn goes on to explain, "Daniel Pearl reckoned he could ride the tiger...a meeting with an Islamofascist bigwig...he thought he had won their trust...they had accepted him...sympathy for Muslim suffering... But in the end they saw none of that: to them, he was an American, a Jew, a trophy. So they set a trap." (p. 185). Daniel Pearl was beheaded by his captors. Mark Steyn sites what went wrong and how others think they, too, can "ride the tiger."
THE FACE OF THE TIGER is a gathering of columns written by Mark Steyn in the year immediately after 9/11. With his dry humor and enlightening eye for revealing overlooked details, Mark Steyn is at his best and most intense in the year immediately following, and focused on, 9/11.
In Mark's December 14, 2001 entry, he points out the illogic, or weird reasoning, of a western writer who was attacked by a Muslim mob, yet blamed the west in general, instead of his attackers in particular, seemingly because Muslims supposedly have a moral right to attack westerners and the west!
"By comparison, every argument the enlightened progressives over on the anti-war side make has at its core the basic proposition that these people are primitives, animals: they are no more culpable for tearing you apart than a pack of hyenas would be... the intellectual assault being waged by the extreme left is explicitly racist." (p. 138)
THE FACE OF THE TIGER is full of interesting observations from Mark Steyn, in his popular style and wit mostly, and it is more focused on world politics than other books by Mark, before his bestselling breakthrough with AMERICA ALONE. He makes and supports many interesting thoughts.
In Mark's June 1, 2002 piece in THE SPECTATOR, "Flying while Arab," Mark asks the question, "Does political correctness kill?" and then Steyn describes how, before 9/11, the famous actor James Woods witnessed and reported what appeared to be a dry run practice for a hijacking. The FAA did nothing, seemingly because of then recent cases of suspects crying foul due to racial discrimination appearing in the national news. Yet two of the four suspects witnessed by James Wood ended up being perpetrators on the 9/11 hijacked planes.
*** On the tensions between the entire Middle East versus Israel, Steyn says:
"For the squalid thug regimes of the region, giving the impression to their hapless peoples that they're engaged in an epic struggle with the Jews helps excuse their own failures as nation states." (p. 122)
"In the objective sense, the Arab states are failures. If Israel was `imposed' on the region in the Forties, the other nations date only from the Twenties. The only difference is the Jews have made a go of it. Both Israel and Egypt get massive subventions from Washington: Egypt, an economic basket-case, pisses it away; Israel is now a net technology exporter." (p. 143)
"Jews are famously `in trade', Arabs are just as famously hopeless at economic creativity: they have oil, but require foreigners to extract it and refine it." (p. 141)
"Meanwhile, the schools teach children about the heroics of the suicide-bombers and in geography class Israel has been literally wiped off the maps." (p. 123)
"Say what you want about the Jews, but they don't sit around on welfare." (p. 144)
"the only Arabs living in freedom are the two million who live in the United States...Europe and, come to that, Israel. ...'multiculturalism', but let us acknowledge at least that it's a unicultural concept: it exists only in the west." (p. 31)
*** On the USA's importance in the world, Mark Steyn writes:
"If America falls, or is diminished, or retreats in on itself, there is no `free world'." (p. 24)
"Just a quarter-century ago, let's not forget, most of southern Europe -- Portugal, Spain, Greece -- was run by dictators." (p. 25)
"The only thing that enables Belgium to be Belgium and Norway to be Norway and Britain to be Britain is the fact that America's America..." (p. 172)
"Americans know what they contribute: they're the engine of the global economy and the pre-eminent military power. But Canada and Europe expect the US to pick up the tab for their defence costs and yet still treat them as serious players." (p. 181)
"But America is also an historical anomaly: the first non-imperial superpower. It has no colonies and no desire for any. For almost 60 years, it's paid for the defence of the west virtually single-handed while creating and supporting structures -- the UN, Nato, G8 -- that exist only to allow its `allies' to pretend they're on an equal footing. For `allies', read dependencies: it's because the US provides generous charity defence guarantees that the European governments have been free to fritter away their revenues on socialised health care and lavish welfare and all the other entitlements the Euro-progressives berate America for not providing for its own citizens." (p. 300)
"The sides the United States and the European Union have chosen to align themselves with say as much about themselves and their own psychological health as they do about Palestine." (p. 145).
*** On the War on Terror, Mark Steyn observes:
"Under our new high-alert procedures, security personnel demonstrate their sensitivity by looking for people who don't look anything like the people they're looking for. Never in the field of human conflict have so many been so inconvenienced to avoid offending so few." (p. 114)
"The only countries who aren't with us are the basket-cases -- Iraq, the Sudan, Cuba, North Korea -- a handful of irrelevant loser states who contribute nothing, economically, culturally, technologically. We are at war with the world's losers. And losers tend to lose." (p. 95)
"If we've learned anything since September 11th, it's that, if it were left to the multilateral acronyms -- the UN, EU, even Nato -- Osama bin Laden would have the run of the planet." (p.91)
*** Domestically speaking in the USA, Mark Steyn speaks as well:
"The reason why there are so many plays and TV movies about Matthew Shepard is because what happened to him three years ago is so rare: he's a poster-child for an epidemic that doesn't exist." (p. 57)
After you have read Mark Steyn's bestseller AMERICA ALONE, make this book, THE FACE OF THE TIGER, your next read by him! America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
Another book by Mark Steyn that I unfortunately do NOT recommend is HEAD TO TOE, which is as much about show business and celebrity obituaries as it is about world politics, so I did not enjoy it as much as the weightier material in AMERICA ALONE and THE FACE OF THE TIGER. Mark Steyn From Head To Toe: An Anatomical Anthology
The Face of the Tiger August 10, 2007
The material is dated but serves as a reminder of why we are fighting terrorism in Iraq and anyplace else we may have to go. It serves as a reminder that we have not been attacked again while the appeasers of the EU have.
 A practice lap for "America Alone" March 29, 2007
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
A compilation of his columns for the year following the September 11 attacks, Steyn's book is worthwhile for the reader who is not a contemporaneous reader of his syndicated articles. However, a better choice for the new reader as well as one who follows Mr. Steyn in the daily press would be "America Alone", in which Steyn evaluates the accuracy of his opinons and predictions (I would gine "America Alone" 4 stars). As an exercize in monday morning quarterbacking, both "Eye of the Tiger" and "America Alone" validate the politcal trends about which Mr. Steyn writes so compellingly.
Manish Gyawali: Biased, yet biased. October 22, 2006
5 out of 40 found this review helpful
"Read his books. Then if you have anything to say, argue rationally for or against what you've read." - Manish Gyawali on Paul Krugman
Practice what you preach, Manish. Let people make-up their own mind about Mark Styne's writings, as you implore in the quote above regarding one with whom your sympathies lie.
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