Humor at its most vigorous and unsparing.
A Pakistani-born comic's account of how he sought salvation in stand-up comedy and then found a new home in Australia.
Growing up in Karachi, a city bloodied by political violence, Shah spent most of his youth “reading, drawing comic books and masturbating.” The first time he left Pakistan was in the late 1990s when he came to the United States to attend college, major in English, and dream of becoming “Pakistan’s answer to Stephen King.” Never especially religious, Shah became a practicing Muslim after 9/11. But when he returned home, he found that the Islam he believed was anything but a religion of peace and promptly turned atheist. “My life would have been a lot easier if I’d just gotten an earring and done some drugs,” he writes. After a stint in advertising that led him to “a deep existential crisis,” Shah found his way into journalism, a career he thought would help him make sense of the “bomb blasts, suicide attacks, gun fights [and] assassinations” that were part of daily life in Pakistan. Witnessing so much bloodshed had the added effect of eventually pushing the author into comedy. He joined an improvisational comedy troupe that earned a devoted following in Karachi and accolades at a Manchester theater festival. Shah later went on to produce, direct, and host a short-lived news satire show called News Weakly. After the show was cut, he left journalism and returned to advertising while continuing to hone his craft. Determined to find a better life, Shah and his wife moved to Australia. There, he not only found the freedom to practice his art, but also became part of the growing national debate about the place of political refugees in Australian society. The narrative is refreshing for its openness about religion, sexuality, and politics, topics that, for the most part, are taboo in the Islamic world. Honest and inspiring, Shah’s book is a reminder of how laughter is not only necessary, but also life-sustaining.
Humor at its most vigorous and unsparing.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-74331-934-5
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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