A scrupulously well-intentioned look at how Christians and Muslims might live respectfully side by side.
Forthright, wry, entirely enjoyable memoir from a Pakistani-British businessman who grew up amid English Christians and questioned his adherence to Islam.
Born in Karachi in 1962, Ahmad moved with his middle-class parents to London a year later. They sought better economic opportunities, but found instead an entrenched system of discrimination. The family first lived in Putney, then Hampton, and early on Ahmad gleaned the impression of being different: “both foreign and not Christian.” He didn’t eat Spam at school like the others and was exempted from attending the religious assembly every day. “I’m not so sure about this,” he writes (his memoir employs present tense throughout). “I quite like singing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful.’ ” Small but significant events began to shape the author’s sense of justice, underscored by his training from age 11 at an Islamic school, where he learned that the Muslims revere the Old Testament and Jesus. Ahmad has an engaging voice, and his mannered prose, presented in brief, anecdotal chapters, is winning. The bookish boy surprised himself by getting into Hampton Grammar School and shone there despite the occasional ugly comments about immigrants. He decided by default to become a doctor, but failed to make the grade. At Stirling University in Scotland, he found theology texts more compelling. He was tortured by the suspicion that loving Jesus was the way into Heaven, as instructed by his Evangelical friend Magnus, and that Islam was the religion of Satan. Gradually, he understood that Islam is a rational religion, rather than an emotional one like Christianity, and while disgusted by the “cultural contamination” of radical Arabic sects, he decided Islam suited him.
A scrupulously well-intentioned look at how Christians and Muslims might live respectfully side by side.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84513-228-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Aurum/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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