A chilling, vital memoir that reveals hidden truths about Afghanistan and directly addresses the misguided policies of the...
Afghan activist Joya makes an urgent plea for the world to acknowledge the truths hidden in the corrupt, complex country of Afghanistan.
The author was born in 1978, less than a year before the Soviet invasion of her country. She grew up one of thousands of refugees in Iran and Pakistan, where she was lucky enough to receive an education thanks to her democratic-minded father. When the Soviet occupation ended, Afghanistan was left with well-armed fundamentalist warlords who pressed the country into civil war. After the regime of the warlords fell to the Taliban, Joya returned to her country for the first time in more than 15 years to teach at an underground school for girls. After 9/11, the extremist warlords again rose to power, backed with support and funding from the United States and its NATO allies in the push to oust the Taliban. Joya, who states emphatically that the Afghan people view the warlords as no better than the Taliban, made international headlines when she denounced them as criminals at a constitutional assembly in Kabul in 2003. Gaining an army of supporters and enemies simultaneously, Joya became the youngest-ever member of Afghan parliament, where she was threatened and attacked for her attempts to expose its corrupt nature before being suspended from her seat. After surviving multiple assassination attempts, she continues to spread her message of human rights, women’s rights, democracy and secularism. The author’s brave narrative uses her personal experiences to outline the oppressive misrule of the past three decades in Afghanistan, and Joya is careful to differentiate between her country’s corrupt government and its freedom-wanting people.
A chilling, vital memoir that reveals hidden truths about Afghanistan and directly addresses the misguided policies of the United States.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0946-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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