Peer tenderly addresses aspects of religion, military and family kinships, but the narrative feels too lightweight for the...
A young Kashmiri recalls his youth and journalistic apprenticeship in a “fragile fairyland” torn apart by the war for independence.
Born in 1977 in Anantnag to a family of educated Muslims, Peer was expected to join the Indian civil service when he grew up, which would ultimately offer a better position in the bureaucracy than his father had attained. However, by the early ’80s civil unrest was widespread. Kashmir’s promised autonomy, granted by India in 1947, was gradually restricted, and the populace began agitating for independence. The guerrilla organization JKLF (Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front) was formed in 1990 and led by 21-year-old militant Yasin Malik. Kashmiri youth were recruited into rebel groups, bused into Pakistan for training and given “magical” Kalashnikovs. Peer experienced both the hero-longing to join up—his father convinced him to stay in school—and the tragedy of learning the fate of those who did, such as his promising cousin Tariq, who killed in a raid. Every aspect of life was disrupted, especially Peer’s boarding school, partly commandeered by the Indian military so the students could hear the screams of rebels being tortured at night. Peer attended Delhi University and studied law, though he left school in 2000 and sought out jobs as a journalist, allowing him to travel between India and Kashmir and offer testament to the ongoing violence. At one point he tracked down survivors from the notorious Papa II torture center, whose stories were almost too painful for him to write about. The second part of the book is a meandering travelogue, as the author recounts sites disfigured by war, such as the once-elegant capital, Srinagar, rendered a “City of No Joy.”
Peer tenderly addresses aspects of religion, military and family kinships, but the narrative feels too lightweight for the subject matter.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0910-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
PERSPECTIVES
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