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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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