A stirring recollection and an insightful national history.
A memoir recounts one man’s wretched experience under tyrannical rule in Afghanistan.
Khaled Siddiq’s family was renowned throughout Afghanistan for its patriotic ardor. Khaled’s grandfather Ghulam Haidar Khan Charkhi was a respected general who fought in the Anglo-Afghan Wars, and all four of his sons, including Khaled’s father, Ghulam Siddiq Khan Charkhi, became important government figures. They participated in Prince Amanullah Khan’s project to aggressively modernize Afghanistan, which included diplomatic relations with European nations, the abolition of slavery, and greater freedom for women. However, after Amanullah was overthrown in 1929 in a coup orchestrated by religious fanatics, Khaled’s family was savagely punished for their loyalty to him. His uncles were murdered, and the rest of the family was placed under house arrest in Kabul and eventually exiled to Sarai Badam, where they lived in squalid conditions. When Khaled and his brothers reached puberty, they were sent to prison—a harrowing experience that’s vividly described here by debut author Adam Siddiq, Khaled’s grandson. He lived in that prison for nearly 15 years and was placed under house arrest for another five following his release in 1945. He found good work as a translator and got married, but he longed to see his father, who lived in exile in Berlin. When Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979, Khaled realized he had no choice but to move his whole family to Germany to save their lives. Siddiq composed this moving remembrance in collaboration with his grandfather, and the entire account is told in first person from Khaled’s perspective. The story, told in precise but moving prose, is often achingly beautiful—a stirring mix of sadness and inspiring triumph. Along the way, Siddiq limns an astute history of the country of Afghanistan that focuses on 40 of its most turbulent and formative years. The book includes black-and-white photographs of Khaled and his family as well as the reproduction of important correspondence in full. It all combines to create an intensely personal memoir whose political and moral dimensions have universal relevance and appeal.
A stirring recollection and an insightful national history.Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-946852-00-7
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Lineage Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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