A lively and convincing antidote to hatred.
A British Muslim reveals a harrowing tale of violence, imprisonment and torture.
Meeting racism head-on as a teenager in Southend in Essex, Southeast England, in the early 1990s meant that Nawaz, whose family was from Pakistan, had to fight off British thugs and began to identify with the shock value of American hip-hop music. Radicalized by the events in Bosnia and Palestine, Nawaz and his brother, Osman, were steered by a British Bangladeshi Muslim named Nasim Ghani toward the revolutionary Islamist group Hizb al-Tahrir, which aimed to unify all Muslim countries under an Islamic state. From attending meetings, which indoctrinated the young men into a fervently anti-Western, anti-Israel militancy and appealed to their anger and resentment, Nawaz grew more provocative in his overt, aggressive Islamist views; he was expelled from Newham College, alarming his parents. While studying Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, he became a leader of HT, volunteering to go to Pakistan and help with recruitment, among other places, and to Egypt, where he was tasked with secretly reviving the HT organization that had been banned by the autocratic Egyptian regime. In the aftermath of 9/11, this was perilous work: The noose was soon tightened around Nawaz and his colleagues, who were rounded up and thrown into Cairo’s notorious Mazra Tora prison at a time when “such niceties as the Geneva Convention” didn’t matter. Enduring years as a political prisoner challenged his righteous views, and bit-by-bit, he recognized the errors of his ways, supported in his legal battles by Amnesty International. Nawaz became a celebrity and a darling of the media circuit, galvanizing a new movement of Muslim tolerance and moderation.
A lively and convincing antidote to hatred.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7627-9136-1
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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