Though the writing is flat, Salbi’s story has value for those hoping to understand the strangeness and ubiquity of Saddam’s...
“He was handsome and charming—no one who meets him ever denies he is attractive.” Thus Saddam Hussein, up close and personal.
The quotation comes from the diary of Salbi’s mother, Alia, a vivacious secular Iraqi whose husband, Salbi’s father, was an airline pilot turned advisor on aviation matters, and for a time the former Iraqi leader’s personal pilot. “Technically,” Salbi writes, “[Saddam] was just my father’s employer,” but he was a friend of sorts, too; “Uncle” liked to show up at their home late at night with a few boxes of Chivas Regal to talk and dance the night away. He was jovial in those days, too, though he confided to Alia that he had killed one of his mistresses when she became involved with another man, never a good strategy with a murderous dictator. The message did not go unheard, and who could deny the leader whatever he wanted? Thus was the milieu in which Salbi grew up, though there is much more to her memoir than all that. She affectingly describes, for example, her childhood discovery of sectarian frictions when a Sunni classmate begins to shun her (“He made me feel like I had cooties”); more strongly still, she recounts the loss of another childhood friendship to politics when a young classmate’s father runs afoul of and is dispatched by the Ba’athist regime. “By the time I met the man who ordered her father’s execution three years later,” she writes, “I had taught myself to forget her last name.” Childhood passes, and when Hussein begins to take closer interest in the adolescent Salbi, her parents send her off to an arranged marriage in America, where she finds herself more or less exiled at the outbreak of the Gulf War—and therein lies another story of challenge overcome.
Though the writing is flat, Salbi’s story has value for those hoping to understand the strangeness and ubiquity of Saddam’s regime.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2005
ISBN: 1-592-40156-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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