An emotionally arresting, thoughtful account about the soul of Afghanistan.
A memoir of a man who grew up in Afghanistan, left for 30 years and returned to help after the country was ravaged by war.
Debut author Sharif departed Afghanistan in 1976 for an education abroad and didn’t come back until three decades had passed. After the U.S. invasion of the country following the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, Sharif joined a special State Department program to become a diplomat, which in turn led him back to Kabul. However, he found Afghanistan all but unrecognizable, torn asunder by war, tribal conflict and a Taliban hellbent on thwarting the establishment of a stable democracy. The book is a series of letters he wrote to family and friends while on assignment in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011. The epistles are bittersweet, enlivened by the author’s joy at finally returning to the place of his birth but also darkened by his realizations that the object of his fond remembrances was now plagued by strife. In one particularly poignant passage, Sharif recounts meeting a barber who turned out to be the grandson of the barber who cut the author’s hair when he was a young child. Interspersed among such personal recollections are meditations on the principal sources of Afghanistan’s troubles and what strategies could conceivably bring relief. He also provides a running commentary on other subjects, such as the core principles of “Pomegranate Diplomacy,” Muslim dietary restrictions, and important but elusive cultural terms and practices. Along the way, Sharif often writes elegiacally about his country: “It is certainly a tall order and a pipe dream on my part to want to restore the current society to some semblance of Afghanistan’s forgotten Golden Era.” The book closes with an epilogue in which the author reflects on the death of his father and, by extension, the decline of his homeland.
An emotionally arresting, thoughtful account about the soul of Afghanistan.Pub Date: July 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499388305
Page Count: 176
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.
A collection of affirmations, noncloying and often provocative, about the things that make justice worth fighting for and life worth living.
Gay—a poet whose last book, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, bears the semantically aligned title Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015)—is fully aware that all is not well in the world: “Racism is often on my mind,” he writes by way of example. But then, he adds, so are pop music, books, gardening, and simple acts of kindness, all of which simple pleasures he chronicles in the “essayettes” that make up this engaging book. There is much to take delight in, beginning with the miraculous accident of birth, his parents, he writes, a “black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination.” As that brief passage makes clear, this is not a saccharine kind of delight-making but instead an exercise in extracting the good from the difficult and ugly. Sometimes this is a touch obvious: There’s delight of a kind to be found in the odd beauty of a praying mantis, but perhaps not when the mantis “is holding in its spiky mitts a large dragonfly, which buzzed and sputtered, its big translucent wings gleaming as the mantis ate its head.” Ah, well, the big ones sometimes eat the little ones, and sometimes we’re left with holes in our heads, an idiom that Gay finds interesting if also sad: “that usage of the simile implies that a hole in the head, administered by oneself, might be a reasonable response.” No, the reasonable response is, as Gay variously enumerates, to resist, enjoy such miracles as we can, revel in oddities such as the “onomatopoeicness of jenky,” eat a pawpaw whenever the chance to do so arises, water our gardens, and even throw up an enthusiastic clawed-finger air quote from time to time, just because we can.
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-792-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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