An important record of prisoner mistreatment as a national reckoning over Guantánamo continues to loom.
A farmer’s son from rural Yemen recounts his harrowing 14-year imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay.
Adayfi’s first-person narrative, co-written by Aiello, focuses on the internal ordeal of a young man (18 at the beginning of his imprisonment) who was sold by Afghan warlords to the Americans as a jihadi after 9/11. Sent on a “special job” to Afghanistan by a sheik at the Dar al-Hadith Islamic institute in Sana’a, where Adayfi studied in the spring of 2001, he was seized, shackled, blindfolded, tortured, and flown to Guantánamo Bay, where the U.S. government had recently created the notorious Camp X-Ray for alleged terrorists. Much of this straightforward, grief-stricken chronicle is an alternately solemn and gruesome account of the horrendous daily treatment of the prisoners, which included genital searches, interrogations, beatings, sensory deprivation, and desecration of their Qurans. That last indignity sometimes led to resistance in the form of hunger strikes, and Adayfi continually emphasizes the lack of respect, especially for the prisoners’ faith. Branded one of the worst troublemakers, the author was assumed to be a middle-aged Egyptian al-Qaida operative named Adel. Consequently, he suffered a decade of solitary confinement. Like many others, he was never assigned a lawyer or properly accused, and he was subject to endless, repetitive interrogation: “Another team replaces the FBI, and then another replaces them. DIA, MI, CIA, NYPD—you don’t know what any of the names mean or who they are, but you ask over and over, ‘Where am I and why am I here?’ They respond with all the same questions.” With Barack Obama’s promise to close the facility, hope emerged and conditions improved (briefly). Adayfi learned English and finally received legal representation, and he was cleared by a review board for relocation to Serbia. “If I didn’t accept their offer…I could spend the rest of my life in Guantánamo,” writes the author near the end of this powerful book.
An important record of prisoner mistreatment as a national reckoning over Guantánamo continues to loom.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-306-92386-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
