Compelling narratives that reveal a grave disillusionment with the world’s responses to the Syrian crisis.
Three Syrians who have faced down their country’s police state tell their respective first-person stories.
Editor Braver (Arts and Sciences/Roger Williams Univ.; November 22, 1963: A Novel, 2008, etc.), along with his student Deveuve, assembles a singular account of the cataclysmic changes that have gripped Syria over the last 50 years through the accounts of three dissidents of different generations who have challenged the state’s “culture of fear”—with awful consequences for themselves and their families. The first is Naila Al-Atrash, a theater director who came of age in the late 1960s and learned to stage political theater through her early work with the Communist Party, which sent her to study in Sofia, Bulgaria. The granddaughter of a leader of the 1925 Syrian revolution for independence against French control, Al-Atrash grew up to hate oppression; she is also the niece of one of the founders of the Ba’ath Party, when, unlike today, it “represented itself as a defender of the oppressed, and a defender of justice.” Al-Atrash provides good historical background to the more recent upheavals, and she has used her theater work to inspire critical thinking and thereby change, despite police harassment. The second narrator, Radwan Ziadeh, who was born in 1976, grew up in the wake of the government’s increasing crackdowns on the Muslim Brotherhood—e.g., Hafez al-Assad’s siege of Hama in 1982, resulting in the massacre of a reported 40,000 civilians. The death of al-Assad and his son Bashar’s initial power grab in 2000 coincided with Ziadeh’s university years and writing for al-Hayat as well as repeated detentions and arrests. In 2007, he and his family fled the country. The youngest voice, Sana Mustafa, was inspired by her courageous father to join the Arab Spring demonstrations; along with her sister, she was repeatedly arrested and interrogated. While she sought asylum in the U.S., her father is still in mysterious detention limbo—or, possibly, dead by torture.
Compelling narratives that reveal a grave disillusionment with the world’s responses to the Syrian crisis.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60801-133-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: UNO Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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