A thorough memoir that would have benefited from deeper insights into how the author’s faith carried her through crises and...
The autobiography of a tireless advocate for women in Islam.
Women's rights activist Khan grew up as a Sunni Muslim in Kashmir, where adherents of several religions rub together and Islam takes a very tolerant form. Her family encouraged the education of women; during a period of political tension, she came to America to finish high school and remained to become a citizen. In her debut, the author maintains that Islam has historically supported the equality of women and men in religious and civil affairs, but its teachings have been distorted over the centuries by radicals, misogynistic male leaders, and appeals to local customs to support the subjugation of women. Her distress at these distortions caused her to fall away from Islam, but she found that her "soul was starved.” She returned to her faith through a Sufi mosque in New York, ultimately marrying its imam. This period of Khan's life most evokes a spiritual journey. Much of the remainder of the book recounts her global efforts to empower Muslim women through appeals to Islamic scripture and early practice and to increase understanding of Islam generally through interfaith encounters, particularly after 9/11. In the process, she gradually gained sufficient confidence in speaking about Islam to lead her own organizations. Running throughout the narrative is Khan’s frustration that her vision of Islam as a religion of peace and gender equality is often challenged by well-publicized terrorist actions and state-sponsored barbarities in explicitly Muslim nations. The author’s account is informative and appealing, and she is doing important work, but it lacks the introspective intensity and focus expected of a spiritual memoir. The loosely organized text is interspersed with illustrative vignettes out of chronological sequence that further disrupt the flow of the narrative.
A thorough memoir that would have benefited from deeper insights into how the author’s faith carried her through crises and how she resolves conflicts between its requirements and those of secular Indian and American cultures.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9526-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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