A sharply delineated personal account charged with great emotional power.
A hair-raising and sensitively wrought tale of an Iraqi soldier who deserted Saddam Hussein’s army in the early 1990s and headed to England to claim political asylum.
The author’s parents had lived in England when he was a child, and his father was studying in Manchester. In 1988, 12-year-old Alsamari was sent to live with his mother in Baghdad, then briefly with his now-returned father in Mosul, all the while growing increasingly alienated from the oppressive conditions in Iraq. While planning—with the aid of his Uncle Saad—to leave the country and find a way to study back in England, Alsamari was summoned for military duty in Samarra. He participated in the physically and mentally debilitating training program before his English-language skills allowed him some movement within the ranks and a chance to escape. After being shot in the leg and driven back to Baghdad by a compassionate taxi driver, the author sought out his uncle to plot a route out of the country. First, Alsamari ensconced himself among the Bedouins, who directed him to the Jordanian border. Successfully fleeing a pack of snarling wolves, he penetrated into Amman, where he worked as a low-wage laborer before attempting the next step by air to Malaysia with a forged United Arab Emirates passport, and then to London. Although he was allowed to stay and work, thanks in part to his Uncle Faisal, who was living in Leeds, he soon learned that his family had been imprisoned at Abu Ghraib as punishment for his escape. After years of attempting to secure money to help them—including embezzlement from his employers, which landed him in British jail and court—Alsamari was able to transport them from Iraq to England. The author later became an actor and went on to play the lead terrorist in Paul Greengrass’s 2006 film United 93.
A sharply delineated personal account charged with great emotional power.Pub Date: March 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-39401-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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