Details of Afghan tribal life and family well-delineated.
A Western writer affectingly takes up the voice of a beleaguered Afghan man and his harrowing flight out of his war-torn country.
McLean assumes the first-person point of view of Baryalai Popal, an Afghan refugee who is now an American citizen. Popal, who hails from one of two “royal families” of Afghanistan, was forced to flee the country with the invasion of the Soviets in 1980 because of his deep family ties. McLean moves back and forth in time to tell Popal’s story, from his perilous flight out of Kabul in October 1980, when the Soviet police were searching his home for him, through an arduous journey into Pakistan and eventual flight out of Karachi to Turkey, and then Germany, where he was able to claim asylum and bring his wife and children, thanks to help from the American consulate. Through the story of Popal, a shortening of the family name Popalzai, the historic enemy of the Barakzai, McLean weaves a fascinating story about family and tribal ties within a culture used to being overrun by foreigners (British, Russian, American) and marked by ongoing traditions that mark loyalty to family, such as hospitality to foreigners. Popal’s father, Abdul Rahman Popal, studied in Paris in the 1920s at the dictates of the modernizing King Amanullah and Gen. Nadir. He was subsequently summoned to serve in many advisory roles, as leaders changed sides depending on the way the political wind was blowing. As a result, Popal the son could rely on many extended friends and acquaintances in his flight to Pakistan, although he largely depended on his wits to survive. Ultimately, the book delineates a sense of what it means to hail from a proud Afghan family in the throes of violence.
Details of Afghan tribal life and family well-delineated.Pub Date: June 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61234-897-1
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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