Bashir clearly tries to distance himself from the mess. No dice, but these up-close notes are useful in understanding the...
An apologetic memoir of life in a bloody tyrant’s hip pocket.
People behave strangely in dictatorships. Take the instance, by the account of Saddam Hussein’s personal physician Bashir, when Uday Hussein replied to his valet’s backtalk by cracking his head open. Saddam was none too happy: “I’ll throttle him with my own hands!” he yelled, calming down only when an advisor reminded him that killing his own son wouldn’t bring the dead valet back to life. Doubtless many of the women whom Uday picked up, then beat and tortured, would not have minded seeing him dead; he lived, only to be killed by American troops along with his brother, Qusay. (In that firefight, Bashir says, the bravest fighter was Qusay’s 13-year-old son, Mustafa.) Bashir, an artist frequently honored by Hussein (and responsible for turning an odd snake-slaying dream of his into a widely reproduced painting), was also a gifted reconstructive surgeon who treated thousands in the course of the bloody, futile Iran-Iraq War; afterward, he wound up doing untold nose jobs, for, he writes, “It is well known that few Arab women are happy with their noses.” Surely many women in the Hussein circle were not, and even at the outbreak of the latest war, some were coming to him for buttock reductions, breast resizings and, yes, nose jobs. The sightings of Saddam himself in Bashir’s pages are only occasional, but they are revealing: They show at turns a pragmatist, though one whose inner circle could not convince him to abandon his hatred of Israel and come to terms with Britain and the U.S. before it was too late, and at other turns a romantic, given to writing gushy genre novels in which someone very like him turns out to be the hero.
Bashir clearly tries to distance himself from the mess. No dice, but these up-close notes are useful in understanding the Hussein regime.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-349-11935-X
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Abacus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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