A lively and convincing antidote to hatred.
A British Muslim reveals a harrowing tale of violence, imprisonment and torture.
Meeting racism head-on as a teenager in Southend in Essex, Southeast England, in the early 1990s meant that Nawaz, whose family was from Pakistan, had to fight off British thugs and began to identify with the shock value of American hip-hop music. Radicalized by the events in Bosnia and Palestine, Nawaz and his brother, Osman, were steered by a British Bangladeshi Muslim named Nasim Ghani toward the revolutionary Islamist group Hizb al-Tahrir, which aimed to unify all Muslim countries under an Islamic state. From attending meetings, which indoctrinated the young men into a fervently anti-Western, anti-Israel militancy and appealed to their anger and resentment, Nawaz grew more provocative in his overt, aggressive Islamist views; he was expelled from Newham College, alarming his parents. While studying Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, he became a leader of HT, volunteering to go to Pakistan and help with recruitment, among other places, and to Egypt, where he was tasked with secretly reviving the HT organization that had been banned by the autocratic Egyptian regime. In the aftermath of 9/11, this was perilous work: The noose was soon tightened around Nawaz and his colleagues, who were rounded up and thrown into Cairo’s notorious Mazra Tora prison at a time when “such niceties as the Geneva Convention” didn’t matter. Enduring years as a political prisoner challenged his righteous views, and bit-by-bit, he recognized the errors of his ways, supported in his legal battles by Amnesty International. Nawaz became a celebrity and a darling of the media circuit, galvanizing a new movement of Muslim tolerance and moderation.
A lively and convincing antidote to hatred.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7627-9136-1
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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
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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