A deeply affecting narrative told in a voice of poignant simplicity, punctuated by injunctions to love that are far from...
Inspiring memoir of the struggle of a Palestinian doctor to preserve his family, humanity and hope in the face of injustice and destruction in the Gaza Strip.
The eldest boy of nine siblings raised in a tiny room in the Jabalia refugee camp, Abuelaish (Public Health/Univ. of Toronto) was determined to lift his family out of the penury to which it had been reduced by its flight in 1948 from its nearby ancestral farm, later swallowed by Ariel Sharon’s ranch. With earnings from working on an Israeli farm when he was 15, the author built his family a house to replace the one bulldozed at Sharon’s order. Despite increasing restrictions on Gazans’ mobility and opportunity, the ragged ghetto boy realized his ambition of becoming the first Palestinian doctor to practice in both Gaza and Israel. Dr. Abuelaish built a five-story building in Jabalia City to house his extended family, who hunkered down there when Israel invaded Gaza in January 2009. Well-known in Israel for his advocacy of medical collaboration as a way to humanize Palestinians’ and Israelis’ perceptions of each other, Abuelaish felt confident that the Israeli tank sitting outside his window would not target his home. His shrieks of anguish when two shells exploded in the next room, killing three of his daughters and his niece, went out live on the Israeli TV news show for which he was a stringer. The worldwide outcry over the carnage inflicted on the household of a champion of nonviolence prompted Israel to declare a cease-fire. Instead of cursing Israelis collectively, Abuelaish passionately reaffirms his conviction that the resentment on both sides will never weaken until the Gaza-Israel barrier is made permeable to regular human interactions between ordinary Palestinians and Israelis.
A deeply affecting narrative told in a voice of poignant simplicity, punctuated by injunctions to love that are far from corny, tried as they are by the searing experiences of a righteous man striving to act decently in a place of madness.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8027-7917-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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