A moving narrative that passionately describes one Muslim woman’s determination to lead a life of her own choosing.
A candid memoir from a Beirut-born Muslim woman who recounts the drama of her personal life against the backdrop of political violence and upheaval in the Middle East.
Written after the author fled war-torn Lebanon in the 1980s, this memoir is a remarkable and fascinating document about a woman’s role in a Muslim family and her will to overcome both personal and political tragedies. Kanafani’s story begins with her troubled home life in Beirut, complete with a family divided over status and fortune, aggressive brothers, and a sexually abusive father. While the young Nadia, as she is referred to in the memoir, survives her ordeals by means of avoidance, dreaming, and denial, she is unable to escape the arranged marriage to her cousin, to whom she was engaged when she was 13. Traumatized by her new situation as a wife and member of her cousin’s family in Haifa (in Palestine, then under British mandate), Nadia displays a stubbornness that leads to her being intoxicated and raped by her frustrated husband. The memoir evocatively describes how Nadia settles into her marriage and motherhood and provides an intriguing insider’s perspective on daily life in Palestine during the 1930s and ’40s. Jewish immigrants (a psychiatrist and a rabbi), Lebanese Christians, and old Palestinian Muslim families come to life in Kanafani’s depictions of personal friends and acquaintances. The Palestinian period and her husband’s death prove to be the first in a series of rebirths and tragedies. During the following decades, Nadia claims her independence and happiness through education, employment, motherhood, travel, romance, and a second blissful marriage. The memoir closes with the violence of the Lebanese civil war, which claimed the life of Nadia’s second husband and a way of life so frankly and (despite its tragic aspects) tenderly described in its earlier pages.
A moving narrative that passionately describes one Muslim woman’s determination to lead a life of her own choosing.Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7656-0311-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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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