Somewhat erratically composed, but an empowering journey nonetheless.
The improbable story of an Afghan-American writer’s hard-won success in organizing the first girls’ Afghan soccer team.
After three decades of war in Afghanistan and five years under the brutal strictures of the Taliban, liberties for girls were gradually erased, from going to school to participating in sports. Ayub’s family fled to the United States in 1979. Growing up an athletic girl in Connecticut, the author learned Pashto and kept in touch with her cultural heritage. In 2003 she sponsored a group of eight Afghan girl athletes to come to America and train for six weeks in preparation for the 2004 International Children’s Games in Cleveland. The girls, ages 11 to 16, had been brought together to practice for some weeks previously at the Afghan Center in Kabul, though the author met them for the first time when they arrived in America in June 2004. In careful, descriptive prose, Ayub introduces each of the girls by way of her personality and family story. Samira, who became the goalie, wasn’t able to attend school in Kabul from age five to ten because of the Taliban’s edict against girls’ education; Robina, the forward and natural leader, had taken to the streets with her numerous siblings to scavenge; the sisters Freshta, a forward, and Laila, a defender, were refugees from Pakistan. Ayub moves back and forth in time to follow the girls’ development, chronicling how the single team eventually evolved into an entire organization, the Afghan Youth Sports Exchange. The narrative is occasionally disorientating, but Ayub offers a deeply sympathetic look at these girls and their immensely complicated existences.
Somewhat erratically composed, but an empowering journey nonetheless.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2249-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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