All but true believers suffer under Daesh, Mikhail makes abundantly clear—but especially women. A powerful study.
An Iraqi journalist and poet long resident in New York returns to her native country to chronicle the misfortunes of Yazidi women under the rule of the Islamic State group.
The country of the Yazidi lies outside Mosul in northern Iraq. Under the control of IS, also called Daesh, it saw the rise of two kinds of smugglers: of cigarettes and of captive women. Using tobacco was strictly forbidden under IS, to great penalty, but kidnapping women was a luxury, a prize of war, that was met by Yazidis and sympathetic Arabs smuggling them back to their families, sometimes impregnated by their captors. The beekeeper of Mikhail’s (The Theory of Absence, 2014, etc.) title likens the stolen women to queen bees, the work of rescuing the sabaya, or sex slaves, to apiculture: “We worked like in a beehive,” he says, “with extreme care and well-planned initiatives.” The women are psychologically damaged and do not always reintegrate easily into Yazidi society. Their accounts are harrowing; one tells the author of being raped by a Daesh fighter who sang, “Oh, Muslim, come, there’s a virgin in heaven” before assaulting her each night, promising her that in the afterlife she would remain a sex slave to serve the faithful, who “would kill themselves to meet their houris in heaven.” Mikhail bears witness to them and other women in war-torn Iraq, women who have scarcely known peace throughout their lives. That she is a poet is clear on each page, as when she writes, “maybe Kurdistan is a daffodil that has only wilted temporarily, only temporarily.” She writes affectingly and well, but newsworthy as it is, her account follows two major books—Cathy Otten’s With Ash on Their Faces and Nadia Murad’s The Last Girl—on the same subject and may be lost in the shuffle. That would be a shame, for it is a meritorious, urgent book that deserves an audience.
All but true believers suffer under Daesh, Mikhail makes abundantly clear—but especially women. A powerful study.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2612-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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