A vivid celebration of a contemporary heroine.
Timely biography conscientiously detailing the brief but courageous life of the young woman who founded the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).
Chavis (Altars in the Street, 1997) read up on Afghanistan’s turbulent history, talked to people who knew Meena, and visited Afghanistan after the Taliban fell in order to fashion this account. Born in Kabul in 1957, Meena contracted typhoid at 12 and nearly died; for the rest of her life she was subject to seizures and weakness in her limbs. Her illness made the already sensitive girl more serious, particularly aware of the plight of women. Though Meena’s mother was illiterate, she and her architect husband insisted that their daughter be educated. At an elite school founded by the French, Meena was a good student who enjoyed her classes and outstanding teachers, one of whom would later join her cause. Chavis deftly details the politically volatile background—the coup that ended the monarchy, the authoritarian republic, the brutal Russian occupation, and their equally harsh Taliban successors—as she chronicles Meena’s decision while at college in 1977 to found RAWA. Determined to help Afghan women, most of whom were illiterate and without any legal rights, Meena and her supporters wanted RAWA to work for both democracy and social justice, objectives that became increasingly difficult and dangerous to achieve as the political situation worsened. Meena married a doctor, who was also politically active, and bore a daughter and later twins, but they were often forced by the political situation to live apart; in 1986 he was tortured and killed by fundamentalists. Meena eventually fled to Pakistan, where she continued RAWA’s work in the refugee camps, making the organization internationally famous. Threatened by her popularity, her opponents had her abducted and killed in 1987.
A vivid celebration of a contemporary heroine.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30689-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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