Although drawing on only limited Pakistani sources, Allen nevertheless creates a compelling look at Bhutto’s tumultuous life...
A concise biography of the divisive Pakistani leader.
In this sharp, perceptive contribution to the Icons series, Allen (Chair, English/Bennington Coll.; The Other Side of the Mirror: an American Travels through Syria, 2011, etc.) examines the controversial Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007), who served two nonconsecutive terms as prime minister in the 1980s and 1990s. Although young Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai called Bhutto an inspiration, the woman who emerges here was arrogant, self-serving, and narcissistic (“addicted to adulation”). As she gained power, the author writes, her pretensions became “elevated from the monarchical…to the positively imperial.” By the time she was installed as prime minister for the second time, in 1993, she “simply caved in to the culture of corruption—indeed excelled in it.” She gave her greedy husband multiple government positions, allowing the couple to enrich themselves on an unprecedented scale—the author estimates they gleaned $2 billion to $3 billion in graft. Bhutto’s outsized sense of self-importance had been nurtured by her powerful father, Pakistan’s president and, later, prime minister. He sent his glamorous, indulged, “pampered favorite daughter” to Radcliffe, then Oxford, where he pressed her to hone her talents as a public speaker by standing for election as president of the Oxford Union, a prestigious debating society. Observers of her career remarked that “style tended to trump substance.” She defined leadership as “being charismatic, as pulling together alliances in a personal way,” rather than making and carrying out policy. Allen’s interviews with a few of Bhutto’s American contemporaries give this biography immediacy and candor, and she distills information from published material, such as Bhutto’s own whitewashed autobiography and scholar Stanley Wolpert’s biography of her father. These sources provide ample evidence of American support and manipulation of Pakistan’s “military, authoritarian regime” and “facade of democracy.”
Although drawing on only limited Pakistani sources, Allen nevertheless creates a compelling look at Bhutto’s tumultuous life and Pakistan’s roiling history.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-64893-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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
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