A refugee courageously recalls his persecution in a book with some iffy details.
A survivor of an Asian military dictatorship recalls his brutal childhood and, later, human rights activism.
Habiburahman was a boy when Myanmar outlawed his ethnic group, the Rohingya, stripping its members of citizenship and turning them into a stateless people. His book is a rare account of growing up during the subsequent catastrophe for the Rohingya, more than 700,000 of whom have since fled across the border to Bangladesh. Writing in a spare and unrelenting present tense—as if to emphasize that the disaster is ongoing—the author describes how he and other Rohingya were reviled as “black infidels,” sent into forced labor, and trapped in villages they couldn’t leave without a permit. As a young adult, writes Habiburahman, he had to use fake identity papers to study at a technical institute, where he worked with pro-democracy companions until someone betrayed the group and he was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. After a jailbreak, he fled to Thailand and Malaysia and then, via a smuggler’s boat, to Australia, where he spent more than 30 months in detention. Eventually, he lost faith that the needed help for the Rohingya would come from Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto head of state, and he became an activist. Written with French journalist Ansel, the book doesn’t explain how Habiburahman reconstructed his memories of events that occurred when he couldn’t have been taking notes; at times, the facts are open to question or appear to conflict with remarks he has made in interviews. Most notably, he writes in an afterword that he has cut ties to his mother, believing his family needed “to become self-sufficient,” a statement that’s hard to fathom after he’s shown repeatedly how hard it is even for a young Rohingya man to achieve self-sufficiency. Despite such inconsistencies, accounts by journalists and other observers support the broad outlines and some particulars of the moral outrages he describes, so his story is a useful addition to the literature of human rights abuses.
A refugee courageously recalls his persecution in a book with some iffy details.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947534-85-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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 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
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