Heartfelt and inspiring.
Winning memoir by a Sufi rock musician determined to encourage harmony between the West and the Muslim world.
Now in his mid-40s, Ahmad grew up in a privileged family in Lahore, Pakistan, attended an elite school and in 1978 joined his first rock band as a Beatles-loving teenager in suburban Tappan, N.Y. His father was an airline executive, his paternal grandfather secretary to the governor of Punjab. Early on, he writes, he decided he wanted no part of being elite if it meant keeping the poor down. At 18, he returned with his family to a Pakistan ruled by a dictator who considered Western rock sinful. When student extremists disrupted his performance with a Lahore high-school band, Ahmad vowed to “wage a rock and roll jihad” to encourage “a cosmic oneness that sees no cultural boundaries.” He later graduated from medical school but has never practiced. The book traces his rise to fame as a member of two of South Asia’s most popular rock groups—Vital Signs and Junoon—and his intense quest for meaning through musical exploration. He describes his friendship with Pakistani cricket star Imran Khan and the evening he took American cricket fan Mick Jagger on a visit to Lahore’s red-light district to see the dancing girls. Ahmad evokes life in Pakistan under recent repressive regimes and shows how both rock music and cricket served as outlets for young people yearning for freedom and democracy. By the late ’90s, Ahmad reached a worldwide audience with his present band, Junoon, which the New York Times’s Jon Pareles called “an Asian answer to Santana.” The group toured the United States and performed at the General Assembly of the United Nations, where Ahmad now serves as a goodwill ambassador. Taking his credo from the Sufi maxim “When you see with the heart, all the masks fall down,” Ahmad has worked to improve relations between Pakistan and India, and in 2008 he wrote the peace song “Ring the Bells” with Melissa Etheridge, who provides the book’s introduction.
Heartfelt and inspiring.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9767-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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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