Writing sympathetically but not uncritically, Moaveni helps readers understand why these women join IS.
Iranian American journalist Moaveni (Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran, 2009, etc.) recounts the stories of women who have joined the cause of the Islamic State group.
According to the current presidential administration, IS is a failing cause, but it remains strong in places such as Iraq and Syria, battling government forces and controlling large territories. Working with 20-odd women involved in IS and their families, the author shows them to be a diverse group with various motivations. “Many thought they were saving themselves, or saving others, from unspeakable harm,” she writes, although on the battlefront of the caliphate, the women would find themselves in grave danger themselves. One of her subjects is a young Tunisian woman whom Moaveni, who uses pseudonyms throughout, calls Nour. She, like many of her compatriots, took up wearing the niqab as an instrument of protest: “For many, being religious became a language through which to demand freedom from the state’s intrusion into daily life.” Salafism, the extremely conservative, Saudi-funded movement, is a rebuke to liberal Tunisians in a secular state; although separated by dress and other strictures, the young women who became Salafi felt “not constrained but empowered.” Just so, IS appealed to young women in secular Britain, some of whom became “true believers” and took up arms. Some died, and some, on returning (or being returned) to their homeland, became wards of the court: “Had she been a young American woman in similar circumstances, caught by American authorities,” observes Moaveni, “it’s likely she would have been prosecuted…and forced to serve a years-long prison sentence." The author adds that it is not just the children of the dispossessed, but the well educated and affluent who join the cause; regardless of their status, however, “no country wants its ISIS citizens back.”
Writing sympathetically but not uncritically, Moaveni helps readers understand why these women join IS.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-17975-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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