A courageous and necessary memoir in troubling times.
A Muslim physician details his unexpected transformation from a rural family doctor into an ambassador for cultural tolerance.
In 2013, Virji left a well-paying position at a Pennsylvania hospital to practice a “dignified medicine” that treated patients as whole people rather than walking ailments. Seeking a better life and a way to redress the doctor shortage in rural America, he relocated to Dawson, Minnesota, a town of less than 1,500 residents. He and his family were the only Muslims, yet they acclimated quickly. Better still, Virji’s career as the well-respected chief of staff, bariatric clinic director, and CEO of his own weight loss business blossomed: “life in every sense [was] good.” The first sign of trouble appeared in 2016 when then–presidential candidate Donald Trump began to “[spew] hatred toward Muslims” in his campaign speeches. Though life in Dawson seemed unaffected by national events, everything changed after Trump won the election. Now seen as a terrorist threat, the author contemplated moving to Dubai only to realize that he did not want to be driven from the home that he and his family had come to love. Then a local pastor approached him to work on an interfaith project that aimed to dispel misconceptions about Islam among the mostly Christian members of the Dawson community. Although he believed that faith was a private matter, Virji made the task a personal jihad, or struggle. His message of tolerance struck a deep chord in Dawson as well as the other Minnesota communities where he was invited to speak. Yet his impact was constantly thwarted by rival lecturers espousing racist, anti-Muslim doctrines that tested the author’s commitment to both the life he had chosen and the spirit of brotherly love he defended. Both candid and compelling, Virji’s book is strong medicine for an age plagued by the ills of xenophobia, misinformation, and distrust.
A courageous and necessary memoir in troubling times.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-57720-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Convergent
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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