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 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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