Conspiracy theorists will find her notes on the fate of Arafat and his inner circle to be of interest, but otherwise this is...
A Lebanese-American woman falls in love with a Palestinian activist, and starry-eyed romance gives way to disappointment, culture clash and a custody battle.
Like Betty Mahmoody, whose Not Without My Daughter (1991) anticipates much of this story, Kanafani labored valiantly to follow the cultural norms of her newfound home—at least for a while. She had been smitten by Marwan Kanafani, the soccer star turned PLO advisor: “Marwan was the axis around whom everyone else revolved,” she writes of their first meeting, “and he commanded the attention of our entire group, expounding on everything from politics to religion.” He continues to expound as their marriage comes undone a scant 30 pages later. Fortunately for him, her husband had other audiences: “As our relationship grew more distant, Marwan’s relationship with Arafat grew stronger.” When the author asked for custody of the children, her husband’s negative response was the final word, softened only years later, after the Intifada of 2000 made life on the West Bank dangerous (and even then, the children left only after Marwan’s new wife put them on a plane). All this drama is actually fairly undramatic. The worthier section is the author’s account of the Palestinians and Arab women she met along the way, many of whom work toward some vision of equality and, in many cases, are activists for peace as well as for women’s issues. She notes that Arafat’s brother Fathi was an activist at well, arranging midnight salons at which Israelis and Palestinians met, ate and talked through the night. “Everyone was eager to accept,” she writes, “scientists, doctors, teachers, artists, filmmakers, musicians. . . . As they shared ideas, people who had been perceived as enemies became human beings.”
Conspiracy theorists will find her notes on the fate of Arafat and his inner circle to be of interest, but otherwise this is pretty thin gruel.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9183-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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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