Although the story is weighed down by the extraneous details of a dark relationship, this is a courageous, and ultimately...
An autobiographical account of a mother retrieving her kidnapped daughter from war-torn Syria.
While the book opens with a story about her ex-husband Mostafa’s abduction of their daughter, the majority of the narrative is dedicated to Monaghan’s reflections on an abusive relationship and how such a relationship progressed into a marriage. “I could have ended the relationship, but I loved Mostafa,” she writes. “I just couldn’t see through him.” After the death of her mother, the author moved from the familiarity of her relatives and home in Dublin to embrace a new start on the sunny beaches of Cyprus. She got off to a good start by establishing a strong social network and achieving a degree of financial comfort. However, her life was irreversibly changed after a chance meeting at a local nightclub with her handsome and charismatic future husband. Ignoring the initial signs of possessive behavior, Monaghan entered into an increasingly destructive relationship with Mostafa, and the author provides detailed descriptions of the verbal, physical and sexual abuse that she endured. When she finally decided to get out of the relationship, Mostafa struck his hardest blow yet by illegally taking their young daughter over international borders into Syria. With the civil war raging, Louise had to somehow gain entrance into Syria and then find a way to bring her daughter home—and she had to accomplish this daunting task with only minimal assistance from the Irish embassy and international law enforcement.
Although the story is weighed down by the extraneous details of a dark relationship, this is a courageous, and ultimately engrossing, story of a woman’s quest to bring her daughter back to safety.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-03027-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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