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 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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