A propulsive memoir that captures the grim reality of small-scale conflict and reveals the fragmented politics of the Middle...
A gritty account of street combat against the ruthless fighters of the Islamic State group.
In clear, thoughtful prose, Azad presents the experiences of many who responded to the jihadi threat in the Middle East. The author volunteered to join the Kurdish resistance against the Islamic State group in Rojava, a region that declared autonomy in the Syrian civil war, becoming an unlikely bulwark against extremism, especially considering their collective decision-making. “In Kobani,” he writes, “between September 2014 and January 2015, two thousand of our men and women stopped ISIS’ twelve thousand. Six months later, we pushed all the jihadis out of Rojava. Our defeat of ISIS set in motion their collapse.” The narrative alternates between the campaign for the town of Kobani and recollections of Azad’s upbringing, during which his progressive family experienced the territorial conflicts and aggression that have long bedeviled the Kurdish people. Although disillusioned with Iranian rule, Azad was obligated to serve in the military, from which he deserted in 2002, ultimately receiving asylum in the U.K. and learning English. Despite enjoying the West’s openness and opportunity, nearly a decade later he felt compelled to return. “Since my arrival in England,” he writes, “I had abandoned my purpose.” Azad’s small militia gradually secured Kobani despite numerous setbacks. They were aided by coalition air strikes against IS fighters, who were known for routinely committing atrocities. The flexibility of Kurdish defenders—they were able to move the small unit of snipers where most needed—allowed them to gradually seize the military initiative even though many volunteers did not return. “So many of my friends had died,” writes the author, “that I had acquired a new, unwanted duty: to survive, to keep their memories alive.” His ruminative prose reflects the unforgiving chaos of close-quarters battle between ruthless enemies, and he coolly describes the sniper’s isolated, time-consuming experience of combat.
A propulsive memoir that captures the grim reality of small-scale conflict and reveals the fragmented politics of the Middle East today.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2907-9
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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 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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