A sobering exposé of Saudi Arabian culture and a tribute to the courage and strength of both the author and her husband.
In a slim volume originally published in Germany last year, the wife of imprisoned human rights activist Raif Badawi keeps her husband’s plight in the public eye.
Aided by Middle East reporter Hoffmann, Haidar reveals not only the harsh treatment of her husband, sentenced to 10 years in a Saudi Arabian prison and 1,000 lashes for the crime of apostasy, but also the severe limitations on the lives of women in Saudi Arabia. A traditionally raised Saudi woman, the author begins her story before their marriage, making vividly clear the segregation of life by gender: the only men she had spoken to were her father and her seven brothers. A cellphone, given to her by a married sister, launched the romance of Haidar and Badawi, and despite fierce family opposition, they married in 2002. Wahabbi Muslims, she writes, constitute a kind of state within a state in Saudi Arabia, controlling religious life, education, and, to some extent, justice. When Badawi started a website related to free speech, the religious police swung into action. He was arrested, and the site was shut down. Having sought and found political asylum, Haidar now lives with their three children in Sherbrooke, Quebec, where she continues to wage an apparently global campaign to win her husband’s freedom. In somewhat stilted prose, she blends the story of their adjustment to life in a cold climate, her estrangement from her Saudi family, her conflict over how much to tell her children, and her efforts, aided by Amnesty International, to win her husband’s release. Although Badawi, a recipient of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, remains in prison, Haidar’s book ends on an optimistic note, her spirits buoyed by the international support her efforts have garnered.
A sobering exposé of Saudi Arabian culture and a tribute to the courage and strength of both the author and her husband.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59051-801-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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 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
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