A dense, intimate portrayal of an ancient people, peppered with the author’s own charming sketches.
A fearless author regards the Afghanis on their own terms.
In a Balkh village in northern Afghanistan that could not be found on the map, where the illiterate Turkoman women fashioned the most exquisite rugs in the world, Philadelphia-based journalist Badkhen (Peace Meals: Candy-Wrapped Kalashnikovs and Other War Stories, 2010, etc.) spent a year chronicling the hard lives of the inhabitant survivors. Her account of one family in Oqa, a dusty village miles from the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, is enormously detailed and moving—though mired, however, in frequently purple prose that clots her narrative rather than clarifies. The people of this ancient land hailed from nomadic ancestors, becoming mostly scavengers of calligonum (a plant) rather than farmers: from patriarch Baba Nazar to his son Amanullah, who yearned to travel and was not allowed to keep the family money due to his profligate ways, to his hardworking wife, Thawra, who squatted over the loom for months to create the gorgeous carpet that would fetch the family’s sole livelihood of a couple hundred dollars (later sold by dealers for thousands to the Westerners), to the famished children who were often afflicted with the “black cough” and addicted to opium from infancy. Rains were rare, trees nonexistent, and there was no longer even a mullah in the village mosque. Yet these timeless clans who had endured the traversing armies of Alexander the Great and Tamerlane, the British and the Soviets, the Taliban and the Americans, continued to adhere to ancient rituals such as buying skeins of yarn in the bazaar, celebrating the weddings of their daughters and observing the fast of Ramadan.
A dense, intimate portrayal of an ancient people, peppered with the author’s own charming sketches.Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59448-832-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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