A Pulitzer Prize finalist delves into the fascinating life and letters of a young Jewish woman who converted to radical Islam and moved from suburban New York to Pakistan.
In 1962, 28-year-old Margaret Marcus left her parents' secular Jewish home to live in Lahore in the Muslim household of idealogue and Islamic political leader Maulana Mawdudi. In Pakistan, Marcus changed her name to Maryam Jameelah and penned expressive letters to her parents describing, during the next three decades, her newfound identity, community and the motivations behind her conversion and all-consuming embrace of Islam. Jameelah went on to write not only letters—the archives of which Baker (A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, 2008, etc.) came across in the New York Public Library—but an enormously popular set of books criticizing Western materialism and exalting life lived according to the laws of the Koran. Baker's account unfolds chronologically through Jameelah's letters, included in the book, as well as various articles she published in American magazines. Despite Jameelah's unwavering, outspoken disdain for Western secularism, she faced mounting obstacles in her new life, all of which the author examines as a platform to explore the broader subject of how radical idealism manifests itself. Jameelah eschewed what she viewed as the miserably misguided popular values of her native country, but this opposition did not tamp out her love for and connection to her parents. On this note, Baker, who corresponded and finally met with Jameelah in her home, opens the door to the vital questions of how radical Islam has impacted the world, and what part converts such as Jameelah have played. An important, searing, highly readable and timely narrative.
Pub Date: May 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55597-582-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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