Peer tenderly addresses aspects of religion, military and family kinships, but the narrative feels too lightweight for the...
A young Kashmiri recalls his youth and journalistic apprenticeship in a “fragile fairyland” torn apart by the war for independence.
Born in 1977 in Anantnag to a family of educated Muslims, Peer was expected to join the Indian civil service when he grew up, which would ultimately offer a better position in the bureaucracy than his father had attained. However, by the early ’80s civil unrest was widespread. Kashmir’s promised autonomy, granted by India in 1947, was gradually restricted, and the populace began agitating for independence. The guerrilla organization JKLF (Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front) was formed in 1990 and led by 21-year-old militant Yasin Malik. Kashmiri youth were recruited into rebel groups, bused into Pakistan for training and given “magical” Kalashnikovs. Peer experienced both the hero-longing to join up—his father convinced him to stay in school—and the tragedy of learning the fate of those who did, such as his promising cousin Tariq, who killed in a raid. Every aspect of life was disrupted, especially Peer’s boarding school, partly commandeered by the Indian military so the students could hear the screams of rebels being tortured at night. Peer attended Delhi University and studied law, though he left school in 2000 and sought out jobs as a journalist, allowing him to travel between India and Kashmir and offer testament to the ongoing violence. At one point he tracked down survivors from the notorious Papa II torture center, whose stories were almost too painful for him to write about. The second part of the book is a meandering travelogue, as the author recounts sites disfigured by war, such as the once-elegant capital, Srinagar, rendered a “City of No Joy.”
Peer tenderly addresses aspects of religion, military and family kinships, but the narrative feels too lightweight for the subject matter.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0910-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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