A powerful memoir from a dedicated fighter for social justice.
A celebrated Muslim American activist’s memoir of how she came into her identity as a social justice leader in post–9/11 America.
Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association in New York, grew up between two worlds: her parents’ Palestinian homeland and her native Brooklyn. She embraced both: for the warm ties she formed with relatives and the “brown, Black and beige kids” in a neighborhood that looked “like every nineties portrayal of [Brooklyn] ever seen in a Spike Lee joint.” She attended John Jay High School, a “notorious gang farm,” where she began to see how her life as a Muslim American was “inextricably interwoven” with the lives of all people of color. When 9/11 took place a few years after she graduated, Sarsour witnessed firsthand the way innocent Muslims suddenly became branded as terrorists. She began working with her father’s cousin Basemah, a social justice activist who ran the Arab American Association of New York. The author credits Basemah, who died tragically just four years later, with teaching her to “make waves…stir the pot…raise holy hell” when communities were in trouble. After Basemah’s death, Sarsour became involved in the fight to create a ground zero mosque as well as protests against the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies, which targeted people of color. The author later joined forces with fellow activists Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez to work on both local and national social justice projects to end racial profiling. The trio organized the Women’s March on Washington to protest the election of a racist, misogynistic president. Despite these triumphs, Sarsour discovered that her own heightened visibility made her family a target for “an avalanche of hate” while compromising her role as a mother. Candid and poignant, this book offers an intimate portrait of a committed activist while emphasizing the need for more Americans to work against the deep-seated inequalities that still haunt the country.
A powerful memoir from a dedicated fighter for social justice.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0516-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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