A grim but worthy read.
This book chronicles the traumatic story of Ahmed, a young Ezidi woman who was abducted by Islamic State group forces from her village in northern Iraq and subsequently forced into sexual slavery.
Ahmed’s ordeal began at age 18, when IS’ army rolled into her native village of Kocho, thwarting her family’s attempt to seek refuge in the surrounding mountains. The village population was promptly split between the men, driven to an unknown fate, and the women and children, rounded up in a nearby school before being forced aboard trucks heading to neighboring Syria. Months of captivity in the most extreme conditions ensued before she was finally sold—alongside Navine, a friend met in captivity, and her nephew, Eivan, who she pretended was her son—to al-Amriki, an American citizen–turned-emir, a high-ranking position in IS’ military hierarchy. In a succession of fortunate circumstances and bold decisions, the trio managed to escape, first from the compound where they were held captive, and then from Syria toward a Turkish refugee camp. Ahmed, reunited with what was left of her family, attempted to heal her wounds and rebuild her life. The first-person narration provides important context for those unfamiliar with the Ezidi. Readers will find it hard not to empathize and be moved by Ahmed’s heart-wrenching ordeal and will likely forgive some of the book’s naïve essentialisms, plot holes, and unfortunate Eurocentrisms.
A grim but worthy read. (authors’ note, map, epilogue) (Nonfiction. 16-adult)Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77321-235-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
A unique format for a memoir—Lowry (Stay!, 1997, etc.) offers up quotes from her books, dates, black-and-white photographs, and recollections of each shot, as well as the other memories surrounding it. The technique is charming and often absorbing; readers meet Lowry's grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren in a manner that suggests thumbing through a photo album with her. The tone is friendly, intimate, and melancholy, because living comes with sorrow: her sister died of cancer at age 28, and Lowry's son, a pilot, died when his plane crashed. Her overall message is taken from the last words that son, Grey, radioed: "You're on your own." The format of this volume is accessible and it reflects the way events are remembered—one idea leading to another, one memory jostling another; unlike conventional autobiographies, however, it will leave readers with unanswered questions: Who was her first husband—and father of her children? Why are her surviving children hardly mentioned? Why does it end—but for one entry—in 1995? It's still an original presentation, one to be appreciated on its own merits.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-89543-X
Page Count: 189
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
An excellent introduction for laymen and students of literature.
A concise account of a tireless political writer’s adventures and education.
The publication of Orwell’s novel 1984 serves as the endpoint for this pocket biography, insofar as everything in the writer’s rich life seems to have contributed to that masterpiece. Agathocleous (English/Rutgers) argues that Orwell’s status as a scholarship boy at Eton awakened his sense of class consciousness early on. Working in the Imperial Police in Burma introduced him to the injustices of colonialism. Posing as a derelict in London and Paris, he began his literary career as a participatory journalist, seeing first-hand the economic failures of the prosperous West. These stories are well known, of course, and the author does not add much to them. Chapters devoted to Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War and as a BBC correspondent in London during WWII are more informative: Orwell was frustrated by the censors and the bureaucrats of the BBC, and these lesser difficulties compared unfavorably with his charged, egalitarian experiences in Spain (where he fought bravely and suffered injuries). Eventually he quit the BBC to write for leftist journals and engage in the political infighting of the day, bucking popular opinion—and elite dogma—in his criticisms of the USSR. In due time that struggle bore fruit: in 1945 he published his fable Animal Farm, a manifesto against the abuse of political power that was also his first critical and financial success. Three years later, with the war over and Stalin by then perceived as an enemy, he wrote 1984 while ensconced on a Scottish island, bedridden and dying from tuberculosis. Details of Orwell’s family life are given throughout, but his literary exploits crowd them out. Recent charges that Orwell denounced friends and colleagues to the British authorities as communist sympathizers are given scant attention, however, and may prompt frustrated readers to wonder why a longer consideration of this topic was omitted.
An excellent introduction for laymen and students of literature.Pub Date: July 3, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-512185-6
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
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