The tremendous human suffering of a nation viewed through the plight of one courageous family. Tatchell's work brings to...
British journalist Tatchell offers a sensitively composed account of the beleaguered life and family of Iraqi poet Nabeel Yasin as they weathered decades of repressive government regimes.
Tatchell's narrative enters seamlessly into the lives of these middle-class, politically aware Iraqis struggling to keep their family intact amid constant upheavals, from the late 1950s, when the army stormed Baghdad and murdered King Faisal and his family, ushering in the modernizing regime of General Kassim, through the brutal rise of the Ba'athist Party in 1963, to the fall of leader Saddam Hussein in 2003. The Yasin family, composed of shopkeeper father Yasin, his seamstress wife, Sabria, and their seven children and numerous relatives, enjoy relative prosperity living in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood until the boys get older and dabble in political events and the family's security is threatened by the National Guard. First, one of the eldest sons, Juma'a, a teacher in his 20s, is seized as a Communist and held and tortured in the notorious football stadium; later, younger son Nabeel, a poet at the university, begins attracting the regime's disapproval with his outspoken criticism. Youngest son Tariq is eventually conscripted into the Iran-Iraq war, while sister Amel, a doctor, is ordered not to care for “enemies” of the state. Nabeel is relentlessly persecuted by Saddam's regime, deprived of his livelihood, blacklisted and driven underground until he’s betrayed by an uncle, when he is sent into exile, along with his wife, Nada, and young son. They live in exile for 21 years, all the while the other family members, either in exile or in Baghdad, try to survive the hardships—mother Sabria's losses are particularly poignant.
The tremendous human suffering of a nation viewed through the plight of one courageous family. Tatchell's work brings to light an important Iraqi voice.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-385-52121-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
