An enlightening, warm, timely coming-of-age story exploring the author’s search for identity framed within the confounding...
In an illuminating memoir, the daughter of Edward Said, the writer, academic and symbol of Palestinian self-determination, explores her complex family history and its role in shaping her identity.
The author grappled with her convoluted family tree as a child, but she has grown weary trying to make sense of the conflicting information she has gathered. “I am a Palestinian-Lebanese-American Christian woman, but I grew up as a Jew in New York City. I began my life, however as a WASP,” she writes. Said comes from a warm, loving home often populated by visiting literary celebrities such as Lillian Hellman and Cornel West, and she is confused by what others say regarding Arab culture. “I resigned myself to believing that everything people said about my culture was true,” she writes, “because it was exhausting and futile to try to convince anyone otherwise.” The author was a high achiever attending Princeton, yet she also battled anorexia. Following a family trip to the Middle East, including her father’s homeland of Palestine, Said learned more about her family history. Her perspective shifted when she realized how little she knew about conditions in the Middle East, especially Gaza. As for many, Said’s life changed following 9/11. To many Americans, the author became part of a group, an Arab-American. Said joined an Arab-American theater group, exploring and enlarging the boundaries of her identity. Following her father’s death, the author spent a summer alone in Lebanon. During her visit, she discovered a compelling connection to the land and people and, ultimately, herself.
An enlightening, warm, timely coming-of-age story exploring the author’s search for identity framed within the confounding maze of America’s relationship with the Middle East.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59448-708-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
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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