Sasson (Princess, 1992) again teams up with a Saudi Arabian princess, alias ``Sultana,'' to bring us more tales from behind the veil. Sultana's sequel to girlhood is motherhood, and her memoir reveals that abuse against women runs rampant in the kingdom. Despite the shelter afforded by wealth and privilege, Sultana's daughters live in a world of unending male brutality. Elder daughter Maha spies on her best friend's father as he deflowers petrified 11- and 12-year-old virgins purchased from their fathers for a few nights of pleasure. After witnessing these acts, Maha experiments with lesbianism, suffers a breakdown, and is whisked to an English mental institution. Her sister seizes upon religious fanaticism, pledging her wealth to the poor, discarding her makeup, and vowing to topple the Al-Sauds' unjust rule. Sultana's days are filled with the mundane machinations of motherhood and the high- drama intrigues of her relatives. Her family's trials include trying to prevent a vaginal circumcision, covering up a nephew's rape of a comatose Western woman in a local hospital, abetting two lovers who elope to Nevada, and consoling a sister who was raped and maimed by her husband, as well as common divorce and adultery. In Saudi society, women have no right to travel alone, claim custody of their children, or choose their husbands. Sultana sees herself as a feminist crusader, but the suspense-filled first- person narrative makes her memoir read like a saga of sexual restrictions and transgressions with medieval punishments lurking at each turn. The detailed documentation of swift and cruel Saudi punishment leaves no doubt that if the king discovered Sultana's true identity, she'd pay dearly for airing the family's dirty laundry. In spite of the breathless tone, a fascinating look at the lifestyles of the rich and Saudi. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-47444-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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