An affecting inside look at the making of an Afghan woman leader, in spite of the repression by traditional Islamic society and the Taliban.
As her father’s 19th child out of a total of 23, and to his second wife out of eight, Koofi learned from an early age that girls were valued very little in the harsh, mountainous, rural Badakhshan province of Afghanistan, where her father was a tribal leader and member of Parliament. In 1978, when Koofi was nearly four, her father was shot by the mujahideen, forcing the author, her mother and other relatives to flee and take refuge with her older brothers. Eventually her mother allowed her to go to school, the first girl in her family to do so. Koofi studied medicine as civil war tore apart the country. With the arrival of the Taliban in 1996, the author’s dreams of going to medical school were eclipsed. Her brother, the chief of police, went into hiding, and her own new husband was periodically imprisoned. “No more progression,” she writes of this desperate period, “only the darkness of the uneducated men who now ruled our land.” Returned to the safety of her home province, her husband dying of tuberculosis and her two young daughters needing care, Koofi gravitated toward teaching English and community-outreach work. By 2003, with the Taliban gone and hope restored in her country, she garnered the support of her male family members to be the one to represent her district in the new Afghan Parliament. Her election and success fighting corruption and promoting women’s issues have set her up as a presidential contender—and a strong leader to watch. In her final chapter, the author offers advice for the international powers overseeing her war-town nation—e.g., do not withdraw “before the job is finished.” With moving letters to her daughters opening each chapter, Koofi delivers an important message.
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-230-12067-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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