A candid tale of survival as a woman and a member of an ethnic minority.
Raw, folksy memoir by a woman who migrated from Uzbekistan to Russia and made a good life for herself and her family.
Bibish’s digressive first-person narrative reads like the transcript of an oral history, full of amusing, offhand anecdotes but without a clear shape or form. Her chatty, vernacular approach has its shortcomings, but also considerable charm. “I will tell you my story to unburden my heart a little,” she begins like a modern-day Moll Flanders, instantly winning over the reader. Born sometime in the 1960s to a large, impoverished family in the harsh region near Khiva, she was named Hadjarbibi in honor of her great-grandfather’s pilgrimage to Mecca and grew up under strict Muslim rules. When she was eight, three men abducted her from the side of the road, drove into the desert, raped her and left her to die. She managed to return to her village, though she did not reveal what had happened. As a teenager, she was again picked up and gang-raped, this time by men she knew, and again she suffered in silence. Leaving her stifling hometown became a priority; she studied hard at school and earned money folk dancing on regional television and as an extra in movies, to the horror of her conservative Muslim neighbors. She eventually married Ikram, a well-off young man from Turkmenia (it was his mother who shortened her name to Bibish), and the couple migrated to Russia in search of a better life. The memoir’s final section dwells on the hardships they underwent to establish themselves in a town near Moscow: discrimination, the bullying of their older, dark-skinned son, difficulties finding an apartment, eking out a meager living as traders in the market. Given all that Bibish has survived, readers may be skeptical of the author’s portrait of herself as a silly rube without common sense.
A candid tale of survival as a woman and a member of an ethnic minority.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7050-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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