Both heartrending and chilling.
Eyewitness account of the systematic genocide inflicted on the black African tribes of Darfur province by Sudan’s Arab government.
Assisted by British broadcast journalist Lewis (co-author: Slave: My True Story, 2004), Bashir begins with her mostly happy childhood in a small village in the western desert. She does not whitewash the past, however: As a young girl she resisted the ritual facial scarification that was customary in her Zaghawa tribe, but could not escape genital mutilation (described in horrific detail). She was the daughter of a cattle herder prosperous enough to send her away to secondary school and to medical school in Khartoum, where she endured (and defied) Arab scorn and mistreatment. While the initial chapters charm with their fascinating portrait of tribal desert life, those that follow are grim. When government officials learned of the young doctor’s determination to treat the wounded from both sides of the conflict destroying Darfur, Bashir was at first threatened and then detained and gang-raped. Following the burning of her village and the rape and slaughter of its inhabitants, she fled south and after some months was able, with the help of a paid agent, to board a plane leaving Sudan. The memoir’s final portion recounts her life in England, where she entered a marriage arranged long-distance by her father. Bashir and her husband (a cousin from her village) repeatedly attempted to gain asylum as refugees, but they were nearly deported; thanks to publicity drummed up by the Aegis Trust, an NGO active in efforts to end the Darfur crisis, they were able to remain in England. Bashir still has no knowledge of the fate or whereabouts of her family in Sudan. An epilogue provides statistics about the extent of the killing and devastation in Darfur, the failed attempts of the international community to halt it and the enabling role of China, a major importer of Sudanese oil and principal supplier of its arms.
Both heartrending and chilling.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-345-50625-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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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