An enchanting and heartbreaking account of an inspiring journey.
Magnetic memoirs of a poet raised in a poor Lebanese village who betters himself through education.
With whimsical prose and a dreamy eye, Ajami describes his life in Saghbine, the small mountain village where he was born: the celebratory gunfire at a wedding, townspeople summoning the village crier to call for their missing priest, his father swearing that he’d come upon a genie. In one particular tale, his mother unknowingly entices a snake to her side with the smell of eggs in olive oil. The author’s lighthearted, fabulist tone continues even during graduate school in a decidedly less picturesque New York City: “As soon as I set foot inside the roaches swished aside, opening a pathway wide enough to allow me to walk…The truly artistic among them had arranged themselves on the walls in fabulous designs, while others handled the mundane aspects of life, each according to its talents and capabilities.” Ajami’s family knows plenty about suffering, and even his description of his father’s physical pain carries a certain bouyant quality: “…the pain began to smoke out of my father’s body and blend with the smoke of the gamblers’ cigars and cigarettes.” Much of the book honors Ajami’s father, who was abandoned to poverty as a baby. Having taught himself to read and write, he gave his children the love of song and poetry. Ajami himself eventually went on to obtain an Ivy League doctorate and raise a family of his own. His rendering of the struggle for a better existence and the tragedies encountered along the way is moving and uplifting.
An enchanting and heartbreaking account of an inspiring journey.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-595-35960-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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