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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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