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 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
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