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WE ARE NOT HERE TO BE BYSTANDERS

A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND RESISTANCE

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

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