A gripping, affecting account of a woman’s travels in hidden worlds.
Australian author Fonti (Adventures in Travel Photography, 2015) explores the plight of a group of Muslim women at the end of the 20th century in this travel memoir.
As a backpacker, the author arrived in Peshawar, Pakistan, on a whim, interested to see what was known then, in 1998, as the “wild west of Asia.” An obscure group called the Taliban had recently taken control of neighboring Afghanistan. The Taliban were Pathans—the same tribal ethnicity as Peshawar’s inhabitants. Fonti quickly realized she had made a mistake coming to the city: as a young woman, traveling alone, she attracted hostile stares from men with long beards and unconcealed automatic weapons. Yet, during this trip, Fonti decided to go deeper, launching an investigation into the lives of Muslim women that eventually stretched from Pakistan to Sweden and Iran. All the women she encountered were attempting to make good lives for themselves despite their second-class status. Her guide to this world was an Iranian named Shaheen: “We were both liberals, but from two different worlds,” she writes. “While India had left me with a bad case of white persons guilt, Shaheen felt ashamed of what being Muslim had come to mean in western eyes.” But although he seemed to share her values, she writes that there was something more hiding behind his bright eyes. Fonti is an able prose stylist and a compelling narrator, her voice equal parts wonder, curiosity, and trepidation. She’s able to embrace the naïveté and narcissism of a First World interloper without allowing it to invalidate her opinions or experiences. It’s not her status as an educated Westerner that makes her a valuable witness, but as an empathetic yet apprehensive outsider. The 1998 setting—pre-9/11, pre-invasion, pre-everything the world now knows about militant fundamentalism in certain corners of the Muslim world—adds a terrible thrill to her narrative. From the weary vantage point of 2015, readers will proceed with the nagging fear that Fonti had no idea what she was getting herself into, and the persistent worry that no one would have known where to look for her if she didn’t come back.
A gripping, affecting account of a woman’s travels in hidden worlds.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9943132-3-2
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Charcoal Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
A crash course in big-bucks tort litigation, as rich as any novel on the scene. In the mid-'70s, the small industrial town of Woburn, Mass., found itself afflicted with a plague of biblical dimensions: 12 local children, 8 of them close neighbors, had died (or were dying) of leukemia. The parents suspected the water supply, which was foul-smelling, rusty, and undrinkable, but they had no hard evidence of a link to the cancers. But in 1979, the accidental discovery of carcinogenic industrial wastes in the town's wells led the grieving parents to hire personal-injury lawyer Jan Schlichtmann, new to the profession but intoxicated with the sizable damages he'd won so far. This is magazine journalist Harr's first book, but his complex portrait of Schlichtmann is the work of a master. Egomaniacal, quixotic, workaholic, greedy, altruistic, and naive, Schlichtmann is Everylawyer, and as he allows the Woburn case to consume his practice, he almost loses his license and his life. Harr wisely downplays the dying-children angle, focusing instead on Schlichtmann's case against the two corporate Goliaths who dumped the waste: Beatrice Foods (represented by Jerome Facher of Boston's Hale & Dorr) and W.R. Grace (represented by William Cheeseman of Boston's Foley, Hoag & Eliot). Despite their white- shoe lineage, Facher and Cheeseman play dirty, withholding evidence and repeatedly seeking Schlichtmann's suspension for having filed a ``frivolous'' lawsuit. But the real villain of the story is Federal District Judge Walter J. Skinner, whose personal dislike of Schlichtmann (and camaraderie with Facher) leads him to grant the defense's motion to split the trial into two protracted phases. By the time Judge Skinner submits four incomprehensible questions to be bewildered jury, Woburn's young victims have been forgottenand the whole legal system has suffered a tragic loss. A paranoid legal thriller as readable as Grisham, but important and illuminating. (Film rights to Disney)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-56349-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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