Although drawing on only limited Pakistani sources, Allen nevertheless creates a compelling look at Bhutto’s tumultuous life...
A concise biography of the divisive Pakistani leader.
In this sharp, perceptive contribution to the Icons series, Allen (Chair, English/Bennington Coll.; The Other Side of the Mirror: an American Travels through Syria, 2011, etc.) examines the controversial Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007), who served two nonconsecutive terms as prime minister in the 1980s and 1990s. Although young Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai called Bhutto an inspiration, the woman who emerges here was arrogant, self-serving, and narcissistic (“addicted to adulation”). As she gained power, the author writes, her pretensions became “elevated from the monarchical…to the positively imperial.” By the time she was installed as prime minister for the second time, in 1993, she “simply caved in to the culture of corruption—indeed excelled in it.” She gave her greedy husband multiple government positions, allowing the couple to enrich themselves on an unprecedented scale—the author estimates they gleaned $2 billion to $3 billion in graft. Bhutto’s outsized sense of self-importance had been nurtured by her powerful father, Pakistan’s president and, later, prime minister. He sent his glamorous, indulged, “pampered favorite daughter” to Radcliffe, then Oxford, where he pressed her to hone her talents as a public speaker by standing for election as president of the Oxford Union, a prestigious debating society. Observers of her career remarked that “style tended to trump substance.” She defined leadership as “being charismatic, as pulling together alliances in a personal way,” rather than making and carrying out policy. Allen’s interviews with a few of Bhutto’s American contemporaries give this biography immediacy and candor, and she distills information from published material, such as Bhutto’s own whitewashed autobiography and scholar Stanley Wolpert’s biography of her father. These sources provide ample evidence of American support and manipulation of Pakistan’s “military, authoritarian regime” and “facade of democracy.”
Although drawing on only limited Pakistani sources, Allen nevertheless creates a compelling look at Bhutto’s tumultuous life and Pakistan’s roiling history.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-64893-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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