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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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