A lovingly researched, well-rendered portrait that sometimes substitutes praise for analysis of the man and his work.
The life and incendiary times of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, a secular Muslim and autodidact who lives in Israel, runs a souvenir shop in Nazareth and has somehow achieved and maintained an ecumenical, humane philosophy.
Ibis Editions founder and editor Hoffman (Houses of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood, 2000) met Ali in 1995 with her husband Peter Cole, the poet’s principal English translator. Since then she has pursued his story—not an easy task for an American-born Jew living in Jerusalem who initially knew no Arabic. During the past 13 years, she has learned the language, prowled civilian and military archives, walked the ground and interviewed countless individuals, probing their memories of cataclysmic events occurring more than a half-century ago. The result is not just a biography of a remarkable man, but a focused history of a region. Hoffman realizes the vast importance of displacement in Ali’s story, most significantly during the 1948 war following the United Nations partition. That war resulted in the destruction of the poet’s home village, Saffuriyya, and sent the 17-year-old and his family into temporary exile in Lebanon. There they suffered unspeakably with thousands of other refugees; Ali was separated from his betrothed and did not see her until decades later, when both had married others. His family returned to the land now called Israel in 1949; they were not allowed to go back to the ruins of their village and endured other severe restrictions. Possessing little formal schooling, Ali had an insatiable hunger for books; among his first purchases was a multivolume Arabic dictionary. He was in his 50s when he published his first collection of poems. Charting her subject’s slow rise into a literary career, Hoffman pauses often, occasionally at great length, to expatiate upon the political, military and literary scene.
A lovingly researched, well-rendered portrait that sometimes substitutes praise for analysis of the man and his work.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-300-14150-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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