A poignant and humane collection.
Testimonials from Syrians about life before, during, and after the 2011 rebellion.
Between 2012 and 2016, Pearlman (Comparative Politics/Northwestern Univ.; Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement, 2011, etc.) had the unique opportunity to interview hundreds of Syrian refugees. The men and women with whom she spoke included “housewives and rebel fighters, hair-gelled teenagers and businessmen in well-pressed shirts, die-hard activists and ordinary families caught in the crossfire.” In this book, she gathers together the stories and organizes them into eight separate sections that reflect “the major phases of the Syrian revolutionary experience.” “Authoritarianism” and “Hope Disappointed” highlight the experiences of her interviewees during the pre-rebellion regime. Many speak of the uneasiness they experienced speaking ill of the government, even outside of their country: “even outside Syria you feel that someone is listening, someone is recording.” Others openly critique the regime, saying that at its best, Syria was “a country of closed communities held together by force” that only became more corrupt and internally divided over time. In “Revolution,” interviewees express the “sadness and happiness and fear and courage” they saw around them as men and women from all the different Syrian communities—Christian, Muslim, and others—protested against tyranny. In “Crackdown,” “Militarization,” and “Living War,” interviewees describe the regime’s efforts at “put[ting] sects against each other and turn[ing] everything into a toxic environment,” while one speaks frankly of how all the government-sanctioned killing transformed even the most peaceful Muslim citizens into “what we call jihadists and you [Americans] call terrorists.” In “Flight,” people talk about leaving loved ones behind in seeking asylum in the West. Some tell stories that end in success, others of lives lived “without dignity.” Pearlman’s book is not only important because it puts names to suffering, but also because it reminds readers—especially in the final segment, “Reflections”—that in the Syrian conflict, “there is no right or wrong,” only problematic “shades of gray.”
A poignant and humane collection.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-265461-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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