The heartfelt story of a woman’s ardent dedication to stopping the senseless “honor” killings in Pakistan.
One woman’s efforts to save women in Pakistan from outdated tribal traditions.
Brohi was born in a rural area of Pakistan where families, particularly the women, obey the men in charge, where women go uneducated and are often married off as child brides, and tribal honor is always at stake. Even before her birth, she was destined to marry an older man. However, her father defied traditions and let her get an education instead, and she grew up believing she would become a doctor. Her path changed completely when her cousin was murdered in an “honor” killing; the girl had fallen in love with a man and run away with him only to be hunted down and killed for bringing dishonor to the tribe. Sickened, enraged, and impassioned, Brohi was determined to stop the killings as well as the physical and verbal violence unleashed against women and young girls. She became an activist, working to improve conditions for young girls like herself by providing training centers where they could get an education and learn how to stop the violence perpetrated against them. Brohi’s moving story unfolds gently and honestly as she shares her fears, triumphs, worries, stress, and the health issues she endured as she consistently marched toward creating change in her beloved Pakistan. Her efforts took her to the United States and other countries where she learned more about the shared humanity of people all over the globe. Throughout these years, she struggled with maintaining honor in her family, particularly with her father, and she shares the ups and downs of their relationship as well. The author illuminates the importance of education for both women and men and the global need for women to be recognized as equals to men.
The heartfelt story of a woman’s ardent dedication to stopping the senseless “honor” killings in Pakistan.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-58801-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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