Compelling narratives that reveal a grave disillusionment with the world’s responses to the Syrian crisis.
Three Syrians who have faced down their country’s police state tell their respective first-person stories.
Editor Braver (Arts and Sciences/Roger Williams Univ.; November 22, 1963: A Novel, 2008, etc.), along with his student Deveuve, assembles a singular account of the cataclysmic changes that have gripped Syria over the last 50 years through the accounts of three dissidents of different generations who have challenged the state’s “culture of fear”—with awful consequences for themselves and their families. The first is Naila Al-Atrash, a theater director who came of age in the late 1960s and learned to stage political theater through her early work with the Communist Party, which sent her to study in Sofia, Bulgaria. The granddaughter of a leader of the 1925 Syrian revolution for independence against French control, Al-Atrash grew up to hate oppression; she is also the niece of one of the founders of the Ba’ath Party, when, unlike today, it “represented itself as a defender of the oppressed, and a defender of justice.” Al-Atrash provides good historical background to the more recent upheavals, and she has used her theater work to inspire critical thinking and thereby change, despite police harassment. The second narrator, Radwan Ziadeh, who was born in 1976, grew up in the wake of the government’s increasing crackdowns on the Muslim Brotherhood—e.g., Hafez al-Assad’s siege of Hama in 1982, resulting in the massacre of a reported 40,000 civilians. The death of al-Assad and his son Bashar’s initial power grab in 2000 coincided with Ziadeh’s university years and writing for al-Hayat as well as repeated detentions and arrests. In 2007, he and his family fled the country. The youngest voice, Sana Mustafa, was inspired by her courageous father to join the Arab Spring demonstrations; along with her sister, she was repeatedly arrested and interrogated. While she sought asylum in the U.S., her father is still in mysterious detention limbo—or, possibly, dead by torture.
Compelling narratives that reveal a grave disillusionment with the world’s responses to the Syrian crisis.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60801-133-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: UNO Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
