A powerful memoir and an unforgettable portrait of a land and a people.
Adventure-filled account of an intrepid young British-Afghan woman’s search for cultural identity.
Shah, whose 2001 television documentary Beneath the Veil examined the realities of Afghan women’s lives under the Taliban, asserts that she has within her two incompatible people: a middle-class liberal pacifist and a “rapacious robber baron” who “glories in risk.” She was raised in England on her father’s stories about a romantic Afghanistan and its brave, noble people. At 17, visiting her extended Afghan family in Peshawar, she saw that her father’s stories represented a male vision; for Afghan women there was a different reality. She returned to the region at age 21 after studying Persian and Arabic, intent on becoming a journalist. Her Western side determined to discover the truth about Afghanistan, Shah recalls; her Afghan side still yearned after her father’s myths. With the Soviet Union backing the Afghanistan communist government and the US supporting the mujahideen, Shah found no romantic fairyland, but a war-torn outpost of Cold War conflict. Eye-opening experiences traveling with the mujahideen led her to question whether their fabled concept of honor was not more about appearance than principle. When, as a freelance journalist, she investigated stories that the rebels were selling Iran their US-supplied Stingers, hand-held anti-aircraft missiles capable of taking down Soviet jets, she came to doubt her father’s faith in the noble mujahideen and other long-held beliefs. Then her mentor, a gentle professor who personified the fairytale Afghanistan she longed to believe in, was murdered; soon afterward, she returned to the West. In a later chapter, Shah recounts her recent trip to a small Afghan village in a fruitless attempt to help three girls featured in Beneath the Veil. This failure sharpened her realization that her two incompatible halves may never be reconciled. “Afghan has confounded me,” she concludes, “just as it has always confounded the West.”
A powerful memoir and an unforgettable portrait of a land and a people.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41531-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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