Stern carefully and gingerly sifts through the changes wrought not only by the American presence, but, critically, by their...
A personalized rendering of a decade’s toll of war on one vilified segment of the Afghan populace determined to change its destiny.
Journalist Stern, who helped launch Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women Initiative, zeroes in on the remarkable efforts of a particular Shia teacher, of the Hazara minority in Afghanistan, who bucked the violent anti-American, pro-Taliban sectarianism during the last decade and managed to establish a well-regarded school outside the country’s capital. The author creates a compelling narrative out of the life of Aziz, aka the Teacher, a former “holy warrior” radicalized when his people were exiled in the early 1990s to refugee camps in Pakistan, where he first started a school. After 9/11, Aziz and the Hazaras fought with the American-led invasion forces against the Taliban and established his school in Kabul, “the first private school in Afghanistan.” Called Marefat—meaning wisdom and enlightenment, among other things—the school grew in enrollment to a few thousand students, both girls and boys, and stuck boldly to an independent, “irreverent” teaching approach—i.e., free of clerical influence. In this intimate narrative, Stern takes up the stories of some of the key players in making the school a success—e.g., Najiba, “the Student,” an illiterate adult woman with several children who not only pushed for her children to attend the school, but resolved to learn to read herself for her own “liberation”; Michael Metrinko, “the American,” who volunteered with the Peace Corps in the Middle East and ended up helping Aziz find funding; and Ta Manna, “the Troublemaker,” a young Hazara student who had to unlearn the terrorist mentality in order to participate in the school. The author concludes with an account of the valiant but doomed attempt to elect an improbable leader, Ashraf Ghani, who, though a Pashtun (an enemy of the Hazaras), is committed to the people’s education.
Stern carefully and gingerly sifts through the changes wrought not only by the American presence, but, critically, by their withdrawal.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-04993-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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