A courageous and necessary memoir in troubling times.
A Muslim physician details his unexpected transformation from a rural family doctor into an ambassador for cultural tolerance.
In 2013, Virji left a well-paying position at a Pennsylvania hospital to practice a “dignified medicine” that treated patients as whole people rather than walking ailments. Seeking a better life and a way to redress the doctor shortage in rural America, he relocated to Dawson, Minnesota, a town of less than 1,500 residents. He and his family were the only Muslims, yet they acclimated quickly. Better still, Virji’s career as the well-respected chief of staff, bariatric clinic director, and CEO of his own weight loss business blossomed: “life in every sense [was] good.” The first sign of trouble appeared in 2016 when then–presidential candidate Donald Trump began to “[spew] hatred toward Muslims” in his campaign speeches. Though life in Dawson seemed unaffected by national events, everything changed after Trump won the election. Now seen as a terrorist threat, the author contemplated moving to Dubai only to realize that he did not want to be driven from the home that he and his family had come to love. Then a local pastor approached him to work on an interfaith project that aimed to dispel misconceptions about Islam among the mostly Christian members of the Dawson community. Although he believed that faith was a private matter, Virji made the task a personal jihad, or struggle. His message of tolerance struck a deep chord in Dawson as well as the other Minnesota communities where he was invited to speak. Yet his impact was constantly thwarted by rival lecturers espousing racist, anti-Muslim doctrines that tested the author’s commitment to both the life he had chosen and the spirit of brotherly love he defended. Both candid and compelling, Virji’s book is strong medicine for an age plagued by the ills of xenophobia, misinformation, and distrust.
A courageous and necessary memoir in troubling times.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-57720-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Convergent
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
