Studded with some useful observation but fails to properly address the title.
The troubled tale of one man’s search for faith and happiness.
A self-described “professional Muslim,” Moghul shares his life story, as a Muslim navigating his faith and a man struggling with mental illness, in painstaking detail. Plagued by health issues during his childhood, the author went on to an adolescence filled with intense angst. Both defined and confined by his religion, Moghul eventually found himself an atheist, of sorts. “I chose not to believe in God,” he explains, “because, with Him out of the way, there was at last room for me.” Circumstances changed, in a way, once he moved away from home and began his studies at New York University. Islam then became a common bond for community and a cause for which the author could work. He helped create a student Islamic center and was heading it up when the 9/11 attacks occurred, thrusting him into the world of media as a voice for Islam. Nevertheless, he was still detached from Islam as a personal faith and suffering from mental illness. A diagnosis of bipolar disorder, near-suicide attempts, a failed marriage, a failed run at law school, and a troubled career as a spokesman for Islam make up the remainder of the book. Moghul’s work is certainly an intriguing case study in psychology. As for his tie to Islam, that is in fact just one piece of the puzzle, and the author’s self-loathing permeates his life story, which becomes almost a caricature of faith-related guilt. “I felt existentially nauseated,” he writes near the end. Despite some almost inevitable insights into life as an American Muslim, this memoir is, above all, a work of catharsis. Readers play the part of therapist, listening to Moghul’s tortured story, which never finds a true resolution.
Studded with some useful observation but fails to properly address the title.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2074-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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
SEEN & HEARD
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