Stunning in both the art and the audacity.
Visually arresting and emotionally devastating, this graphic memoir of war and childhood feels like an art book and explodes like a car bomb.
Now based in Paris, Ziadé recounts her childhood in Beirut, where the privileged life of a well-to-do Christian family was shattered by incomprehensible conflict. Unlike the convention of most graphic narratives, this is not a work of panels and captions. Instead, full-page, full-color illustrations are interspersed with occasional pages of text, mostly short bursts of a paragraph or two, using an adult’s command of prose to reflect the perspective of a young child, one who grappled with the complexities of lethal violence that pitted Christians against Muslims, Christians against Christians, Palestinians against Israelis. “I would have loved to learn that the Palestinians were actually the bad guys; it would have been so much easier,” she writes. “At eight I had entered a complex world filled with contradictions and nuances.” Rather than offering a political polemic, Ziadé shows how it felt to find the comforts of consumer culture (often rendered with Warhol-esque brand names) give way to violence that then became the everyday reality. “It’s a casual war. For us, what’s important is doing it with style,” she writes with a child’s open-eyed wonder. She then continues after three pages of drawings (Chivas and cigar, a cheeseburger, corpses at the feet of rifle-toting terrorists): “In Lebanon, the violence takes on legendary status. It’s paramount as the war unfolds—during the first two years everyone is having so much fun: it becomes a ritual for fighters from both sides to drag their prisoners through the streets behind a car until they die. Torture and mutilations are common practice.”
Stunning in both the art and the audacity.Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-56656-877-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Interlink Graphic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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