A vivid, timely story of survival. If spies live in boredom punctuated by flashes of terrifying action, then refugees on the...
The story of a boy’s flight from a rapidly unraveling, murderous Afghanistan.
Passarlay was 12 years old when his mother gave him strict orders: “Be brave. This is for your own good….However bad it gets, don’t come back.” His father, suspected by U.S. troops of cooperating with the Taliban, had been killed during a raid on their house, and this was no time for his sons to stick around. Thus begins the author’s tale of his long odyssey west, a journey that would take him halfway around the world. Passarlay and his brother were separated early on, so the author had to survive on the wiles of a 12-year-old, which boiled down to him getting taken at every turn, giving a child’s trust to one smooth- talking or brutish fixer after another. Occasionally, Passarlay’s youthful voice sounds a little too worldly—“Despair filled my pockets like stones”—but the author provides all manner of small incidents and moments of awakening that leave a lasting impression: “I had never see a blonde woman before,” he notes in Germany; “I had had such high expectations for Paris, the city where perfume rained from the skies. And yet all I had witnessed was a dirty, smelly, and cold city, filled with Parisians who shied away from us in horror.” Mostly, this journey is a mare’s- nest of misery—dirty, hungry, homesick, scared—but Passarlay had one trick up his sleeve. As a clever young kid, he could hide and stow away. He eventually made it to London, traumatized—“The next day I calmly walked into a pharmacy and bought a bottle of paracetamol. Then I swallowed them all”—and the nightmares linger, eight years after.
A vivid, timely story of survival. If spies live in boredom punctuated by flashes of terrifying action, then refugees on the run live in constant high anxiety punctuated by flashes of horror and panic.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-244387-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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