An affecting inside look at the making of an Afghan woman leader, in spite of the repression by traditional Islamic society and the Taliban.
As her father’s 19th child out of a total of 23, and to his second wife out of eight, Koofi learned from an early age that girls were valued very little in the harsh, mountainous, rural Badakhshan province of Afghanistan, where her father was a tribal leader and member of Parliament. In 1978, when Koofi was nearly four, her father was shot by the mujahideen, forcing the author, her mother and other relatives to flee and take refuge with her older brothers. Eventually her mother allowed her to go to school, the first girl in her family to do so. Koofi studied medicine as civil war tore apart the country. With the arrival of the Taliban in 1996, the author’s dreams of going to medical school were eclipsed. Her brother, the chief of police, went into hiding, and her own new husband was periodically imprisoned. “No more progression,” she writes of this desperate period, “only the darkness of the uneducated men who now ruled our land.” Returned to the safety of her home province, her husband dying of tuberculosis and her two young daughters needing care, Koofi gravitated toward teaching English and community-outreach work. By 2003, with the Taliban gone and hope restored in her country, she garnered the support of her male family members to be the one to represent her district in the new Afghan Parliament. Her election and success fighting corruption and promoting women’s issues have set her up as a presidential contender—and a strong leader to watch. In her final chapter, the author offers advice for the international powers overseeing her war-town nation—e.g., do not withdraw “before the job is finished.” With moving letters to her daughters opening each chapter, Koofi delivers an important message.
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-230-12067-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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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