An action-packed account of the civil war in Yemen from a woman who experienced it firsthand.
How one woman became a war journalist almost by accident.
Fed up with life in New York City, where she felt stuck in a rut, 20-something Kasinof longed to go to the Middle East and write freelance articles for a living. When a friend suggested she move to Yemen, a country that in 2009 seemed safer than Egypt or Syria, the author leapt at the idea. Having studied Arabic in college, she quickly fell in love with the hospitable people of Yemen and even became a minicelebrity when she played an American in a Yemeni soap opera. She had no idea that the country would soon become a hotbed of anti-government protests, which escalated into a full-blown war between supporters of the dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and those who wanted him ousted from power. Suddenly, Kasinof was in the middle of the gunfire, writing news reports for the New York Times and loving (almost) every minute of it. In this debut memoir, the author provides vivid details of those years, bringing readers into the heat of the conflicts, into the mosques-turned-hospitals filled with the wounded and dying, and into the sitting rooms where she interviewed some of the most important men in Yemen while they chewed khat leaves together. The tensions ran high, as did the adrenaline, which Kasinof admits she became addicted to. She placed herself in some sketchy situations in hopes of an interview, but her affection for the Yemeni people made her want to stay there and report what she saw to the world. Fortunately for readers, she’s taken those moments and shared them, offering a moving portrait of life as a war correspondent.
An action-packed account of the civil war in Yemen from a woman who experienced it firsthand.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1628724455
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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