An engaging yet heartbreaking narrative that reads like fiction.
A chronicle of a dark period for the beleaguered zoo of Mosul when a longtime denizen and family man tried to keep the animals safe during the brutal two-year occupation by the Islamic State group.
In June 2014, the Iraqi forces fled the strategic city of Mosul, “Iraq’s second city and home to over half a million people,” leaving IS to move in. Sunday Times Middle East correspondent Callaghan tells the story of the self-appointed zookeeper at the local zoo, Abu Laith, his second wife, Lumia, and their many children, who were suddenly subsumed under the laws of Sharia. This meant complying with numerous arbitrary statutes about dress and mores to which they were unaccustomed. Moreover, the animals’ cages were inexplicably moved next to Abu Laith’s house, near the park and mosque. Afraid the owner was plotting to sell them off, he needed “a spy” to keep an eye on them and help feed and care for them—especially his favorite family of lions, Mother and Father and baby Zombie, whom Abu Laith had cared for since a cub. Marwan, the young assistant, and Abu Laith went to enormous measures to try to keep the animals fed as well as safe from visitors, efforts that the author narrates capably. In brisk chapters that move back and forth among her protagonists, Callaghan also tells the story of Hakam Zarari, a former government scientist, and his family, who were horrified by the brutal methods of IS. As the liberation of the city began in late 2016, the dangers of violent death increased, as did the trauma and threat to the vulnerable, starving animals. Yet it was not Abu Laith who ultimately “saved” the animals but Egyptian-born, Austria-trained vet Dr. Amir—previously the rescuer of the Baghdad Zoo’s remaining animals—who was informed of the Mosul zoo’s lot by Hakam and swept in to help.
An engaging yet heartbreaking narrative that reads like fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-24894-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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