Part political essay, part open love letter to little girls growing up afraid to claim their identities, this fresh memoir...
The founder of Muslimgirl.com writes a searing memoir of her young life as a Muslim-American girl growing up in an era of Islamophobia.
Beginning with a wise warning about the dangers of using a “single story” to define a minority group, Al-Khatahtbeh takes readers on a memorable journey chronicling her development from childhood to womanhood. Al-Khatahtbeh was 9 years old when the twin towers fell. Both the national tragedy and the backlash against Muslims deeply affected her developing sense of identity. Growing up in New Jersey, spending her 13th year in her father’s native Jordan, donning the hijab upon returning to the United States, and post-college work experiences with media outlets culminated in her full-time focus on the necessary work of highlighting Muslim women’s voices. The development of her brainchild, the collaborative blog and media outlet muslimgirl.com, takes center stage in the second half of the book. Her work has inspired many, and now the story of how she arrived at it can inspire as well. The occasional lack of narrative flow barely detracts from the vital message this book brings to the national conversation. Al-Khatahtbeh’s perspective details the impact of our political climate on the identities of our youth and demonstrates the need for outlets like the one she founded.
Part political essay, part open love letter to little girls growing up afraid to claim their identities, this fresh memoir is an important read for Americans of all backgrounds.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5950-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 18, 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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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