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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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