A memorable, inspiring story of courageous community-building.
The story of a young Afghan woman who outwitted the Taliban to become a successful entrepreneur.
At age 19, Kamela Sediqi started a tailoring business in Kabul that saved her family and possibly hundreds of women from starvation. In 1996, the Taliban seized control of the Afghan government and “began reshaping the cosmopolitan capital according to their utopian vision of seventh-century Islam.” Radical separation of the sexes became the norm, with public lives and spaces reserved for men only. All women—including educated professionals—were forced into home sequestration. The new order wreaked economic havoc and forced political dissidents, including Kamela’s father, to flee for their lives. Desperate to support her family, Kamela, who had trained to become a teacher, took advantage of a loophole in Taliban rules that permitted women to work at home and began sewing clothes for local stores. Though she endured threats of harassment, beating and imprisonment by armed guards, Kamela’s business thrived, to the point where the unlikely entrepreneur was able to employ her five sisters. As word of her work spread, so did her client list. Soon, “the dressmaker of Khair Khana” was offering both jobs and training to neighborhood women in dire circumstances. Hardship derailed Kamela’s plans to teach high school but allowed her to discover her true calling—helping her people help themselves. Former ABC News producer Lemmon’s account is the product of several years of in-depth interviewing, and the author convincingly evokes the atmosphere of Taliban-era Kabul. The author also pays scrupulous attention to the details of character development and narrative momentum. Both are well-delineated, though Kamela and her family members (especially the female ones) at times seem drawn to fit more of a heroic—rather than human—mold. However, the moving story will allow readers to overlook such a minor flaw. As Lemmon writes, women in war zones like Afghanistan are more often depicted as “victims of war who deserve our sympathy rather than as resilient survivors who demand our respect. I was determined to change this.” Mission accomplished.
A memorable, inspiring story of courageous community-building.Pub Date: March 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-173237-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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
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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