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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 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
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