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THE TERRORIST'S SON

Name: THE TERRORIST'S SON
Author: Zak Ebrahim
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8480-9

A STORY OF CHOICE

by Zak Ebrahim with Jeff Giles ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 2014

Ebrahim turns Auden’s cautionary words on evil upside down with this brief but moving “portrait of a young man who was...

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The inspiring story of a peace advocate who was raised in the dogma of hate but chose a different path.

With the assistance of journalist Giles, Ebrahim conjures a child’s voice as he tells the story of his life thus far. The book opens with a shock: The author is 7 years old, living in New Jersey, and it’s the middle of the night. His mother is shaking him awake and telling him to pack his things; there’s been an accident, someone is hurt, and they must go to a hospital in Brooklyn. It turns out that his father, El-Sayyid Nosair, has assassinated Meir Kahane, leader of the Jewish Defense League, and is a protégé of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the fundamentalist “Blind Sheik.” Later, Ebrahim’s father was also convicted of helping plot the first World Trade Center bombing from prison. Throughout the book, the author is all youthful anxiety: confused, fearful, bullied, angry, self-loathing. Despite the clarity of the writing, these emotions are experienced through a glass darkly and are spooky to the point of chilling. Ebrahim explains how easy it is to implant bigotry in children: “Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Pi equals 3.14. All Jews are evil, and homosexuality is an abomination. Paris is the capital of France.” They sound like facts; a child can’t tell the difference, and they fear the “other.” As the author notes, bigotry is “such a maddeningly perfect circle.” Ebrahim could easily have trod that path, but his mother was a counterforce, somehow teaching her son empathy, and she stunned him with six simple words: “I’m so sick of hating people.”

Ebrahim turns Auden’s cautionary words on evil upside down with this brief but moving “portrait of a young man who was raised in the fires of fanaticism and embraced nonviolence instead.”

Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4767-8480-9

Page Count: 112

Publisher: TED/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.