by Andrew Harding ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 29, 2016
A beautifully rendered narrative and characterization portrays the soul of a country few Westerners truly understand.
A fluid, sympathetic journalistic foray into the tumultuous history of Somalia as lived by an intriguing impresario and activist.
Riven over the decades by clan divisions, famine, military coups, dictatorship, and terror by the jihadi group Al-Shabaab, Somalia has seen much of its population displaced and traumatized and only now returning to some peace and stability. In his engaging biography of one unlikely local hero, Mohamud “Tarzan” Nur, Johannesburg-based journalist Harding follows the fortunes of one family of exiles who have returned to the war-scarred capital of Mogadishu to stick it out and reclaim their city from a horrible legacy of civil war. With elegant descriptions, Harding brings this East African coastal country to vivid life, depicting a sun-drenched “pearl of the Indian Ocean” made up of tall, slender nomads whom he found “impossibly, jaw-droppingly resilient” in the face of decades of hardship and violence. The author hones in on Nur, who was born to a poor mother, fatherless, raised in an orphanage, found some outlet as a youth in basketball, and was educated largely by his wits. His outspokenness and the Somalian war with Ethiopia over the neighboring Ogaden region prompted him first to seek employment in Saudi Arabia. His bride, Shamis, followed for love, and the couple had six children, whom Shamis mostly raised by herself after seeking asylum in London without her husband. The family eventually returned to their homeland in 2010 when the Al-Shabaab terrorist group finally left the city. Courageously—or foolishly, as Harding suggests—Nur accepted the dangerous job of mayor and proceeded to try to infuse the destroyed city with his jaunty brand of optimism. While corruption still prevails, Harding reveals enormous goodwill in the beleaguered people who have returned to rebuild their beloved country.
A beautifully rendered narrative and characterization portrays the soul of a country few Westerners truly understand.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07234-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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