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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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