A memoir both political and personal, offering a human and humane perspective on one Palestinian’s life. (b&w...
A former political activist in the occupied territories looks back on his youthful struggle to come to terms with his father, as well as with an idealized Palestinian past and an unrealized Palestinian future.
Shehadeh, a lawyer and a writer who now lives quietly in the West Bank town of Ramallah, founded the internationally respected human rights organization Al Haq, which mounted legal challenges to Israeli settlements on the West Bank and exposed the treatment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Raja’s father, Aziz Shehadeh, was also a prominent lawyer and a political activist. A refugee from Jaffa following the 1948 conflict, Aziz came to believe that recognizing Israel was the only way to maintain a Palestinian nation. He was condemned by Arab nationalists and also drew fire when he became the defense attorney for those accused of assassinating King Abdullah of Jordan. He was murdered in 1985, not for his political beliefs but probably over a minor legal wrangle. All this lays the foundation for Raja’s reflections on his childhood, during which family members incessantly recalled their former comforts and refused to confront the reality of the Israeli takeover. Chapters about Raja’s education in London and India reveal the emotional conflict between father and son, as well as Raja’s efforts to find a role for himself in the political struggle between Palestinians and Israelis. Partly as a result of his disillusionment with the Israeli investigation of his father’s murder, he affiliated with the first intifada and became a legal advisor to the Palestinians at the Madrid peace conference in 1991. He left “in despair a year after they began.” Shehadeh also describes eloquently the devastation of the biblical hills surrounding his home as Israeli bulldozers make room for settlements.
A memoir both political and personal, offering a human and humane perspective on one Palestinian’s life. (b&w photographs)Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2002
ISBN: 1-58642-032-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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