Well-rendered and affecting, this is a fine delineation of the plight of an unwitting protagonist in the Syrian...
The moving story of a Palestinian musician and his family suddenly thrust into the perilous vortex of the Syrian civil war.
In a book originally published in Germany, Ahmad, a humble pianist and cherished son in his Palestinian refugee family, chronicles his young life and early ambitions as a new husband and father in Yarmouk, Syria, before the Arab Spring and subsequent war shattered his adopted land. The author was born to a teacher mother and a blind violinist and carpenter father, who essentially raised the boy, taking him to school and compelling him to apply to the State School of Music in Damascus. Ahmad was a talented pianist, but his status as a poor refugee son rendered him a charity case at the music school; at public school, he was bullied “because I was so small and skinny.” Moreover, as a child of parents with torn loyalties, he could not adequately demonstrate the necessary obsequiousness to the Syrian state of Bashar al-Assad. Remarkably, the author and his father opened a thriving music store in Yarmouk, where they gave lessons and built ouds to be shipped all over the world. With the coming of the civil war in 2012, the author was in his early 20s, engaged to be married, and increasingly aware that the Syrian regime was using the Palestinian refugees as pawns in a game involving the “alleged Zionist conspiracy” with Israel. Entrenched in their hometown and determined to stay despite the bombing and snipers, Ahmad used his musical prowess to galvanize his community, organizing gatherings for young people and videotaping his efforts to export hope to the besieged Syrians at large. Ultimately, the town was sealed off, overrun by the government and rebels alike, forcing the family to flee. Ahmad’s dangerous solo journey to Germany forms the last part of the book, as his story aroused the concern of Western aid and refugee groups.
Well-rendered and affecting, this is a fine delineation of the plight of an unwitting protagonist in the Syrian conflagration.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7349-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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