A beautifully wrought memoir from a pioneering Iraqi author.
An Iraqi poet depicts her wrenching childhood and coming-of-age under her country’s series of debilitating wars.
Growing up in the small town of Najaf, Hassan was the eldest in a growing middle-class family—her father had to work two jobs as a clerk and a cook—that moved often to find better housing and educational opportunities for her and her siblings. School was her refuge, and despite the increasingly tumultuous political events in Iraq, she excelled. By 1980, however, everything changed with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran. “This year and the following ones tattooed all Iraqis with loss and death,” writes Hassan. Though Hussein and his advisers boasted that it would be a quick conquest, it became an eight-year slog that destroyed the country’s economy and caused the senseless deaths of countless Iraqis—all while Hussein ordered the construction of more than 100 lavish palaces. “Ordinary people,” writes the author, “experienced brutal lives as they endured the scourge of abject, relentless, crushing poverty, having been deserted by their government, which had inflicted these woes upon them.” In a vividly detailed narrative, the author is always candid, unafraid to express her feelings. From 1980, she writes, “I was obsessed by a feeling of revulsion—as if a large snake had swallowed me.” School disruptions, food scarcity, the sudden disappearance of friends and family, air sirens, explosions, and government surveillance—all marked her formative years. Fortunately, her father supported her education, and she became an accomplished teacher and then a published poet, the first woman in her town to achieve such a feat. She reluctantly gave in to her family’s wishes and married a man she did not know. The union was disastrous, and Hassan endured death threats by a virulently chauvinistic society that pursued her relentlessly into exile. Throughout, Hassan renders her harrowing experiences in an authentic, heartfelt manner, offering important testimony of personal and national courage.
A beautifully wrought memoir from a pioneering Iraqi author.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3617-7
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.
A writer’s journey to find himself.
In January 2015, French novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and memoirist Carrère began a 10-day meditation retreat in the Morvan forest of central France. For 10 hours per day, he practiced Vipassana, “the commando training of meditation,” hoping for both self-awareness and material for a book. “I’m under cover,” he confesses, planning to rely on memory rather than break the center’s rule forbidding note taking. Long a practitioner of tai chi, the author saw yoga, too, as a means of “curtailing your ego, your greed, your thirst for competition and conquest, about educating your conscience to allow it unfiltered access to reality, to things as they are.” Harsh reality, however, ended his stay after four days: A friend had been killed in a brutal attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and he was asked to speak at his funeral. Carrère’s vivid memoir, translated by Lambert—and, Carrère admits, partly fictionalized—covers four tumultuous years, weaving “seemingly disparate” experiences into an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma. Besides reflecting on yoga, he reveals the recurring depression and “erratic, disconnected, unrelenting” thoughts that led to an unexpected diagnosis; his four-month hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, during which he received electroshock therapy; his motivation for, and process of, writing; a stay on the Greek island of Leros, where he taught writing to teenage refugees, whose fraught journeys and quiet dreams he portrays with warmth and compassion; his recollection of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, which he wrote about in Lives Other Than My Own; an intense love affair; and, at last, a revival of happiness. Carrère had planned to call his yoga book Exhaling, which could serve for this memoir as well: There is a sense of relief and release in his effort to make sense of his evolving self.
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60494-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
This is a man who has seen it all, and he sure does know how to tell a story.
Fighting back against a nearly fatal health crisis, a renowned foreign correspondent reviews his career.
New York Times journalist Nordland, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has reported from more than 150 countries. Working in Delhi on July 4, 2019, he had a seizure and lost consciousness. At that point, he began his “second life,” one defined by a glioblastoma multiforme tumor. “From 3 to 6 percent of glioblastoma patients are cured; one of them will bear my name,” writes the author, while claiming that the disease “has proved to be the best thing that ever happened to me.” From the perspective of his second life, which marked the end of his estrangement from his adult children, he reflects on his first, which began with a difficult childhood in Philadelphia. His abusive father was a “predatory pedophile.” His mother, fortunately, was “astonishingly patient and saintly,” and Nordland and his younger siblings stuck close together. After a brief phase of youthful criminality, the author began his career in journalism at the Penn State campus newspaper. Interspersing numerous landmark articles—some less interesting than others, but the best are wonderful—Nordland shows how he carried out the burden of being his father’s son: “Whether in Bosnia or Kabul, Cambodia or Nigeria, Philadelphia or Baghdad, I always seemed to gravitate toward stories about vulnerable people, especially women and children—since they will always be the most vulnerable in any society—being exploited or mistreated by powerful men or powerful social norms.” Indeed, some of the stories reveal the worst in human nature. A final section, detailing his life since his diagnosis in chapters such as “I Forget the Name of This Chapter: On Memory,” wraps up the narrative with humor, candor, and reflection.
This is a man who has seen it all, and he sure does know how to tell a story.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780063096226
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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