A passionate plea for help from a desperate woman who stands behind her pledge of innocence.
The unbelievable but true story of how a difference in religions could cost a woman her life.
Being a Christian in the predominately Muslim country of Pakistan is never easy, but taking a drink of water on a hot day from a local well should be a simple act. For Bibi, it was, until her Muslim neighbors saw her use the community cup. Suddenly, with this innocent deed, Bibi's life turned into a nightmare. As one woman said, "Listen, all of you, this Christian has dirtied the water in the well by drinking from our cup and dipping it back in several times.” Told simply and honestly, with the help of French journalist Tollet, Bibi describes the incredible turn of events that landed her in prison, awaiting her execution. She describes the horrible prison conditions, including the lack of toilet facilities and water to clean herself, the insufficient blankets during the cold months and the overwhelming fear that surrounds her as she lingers in her cell. She is unable to see her young children and only sees her husband infrequently; the family has had to go into hiding because of the outrage caused by her actions. She is surrounded by other women who have been imprisoned for adultery, "but in reality many of them have been raped. Although these women are victims, they're regarded as guilty." The governor who supported Bibi's innocence was murdered, and Bibi was moved into solitary confinement for her own protection, her every move monitored by cameras placed in the ceiling. Her story is emotional and moving and a cry for help as she still sits and waits for her sentence to be carried out.
A passionate plea for help from a desperate woman who stands behind her pledge of innocence.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61374-889-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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