A vivid personal account of a courageous young woman standing up to one of the world’s most oppressive theocracies.
In her first book, squash champion Toorpakai recounts her remarkable life as a tomboy athlete in tribal Pakistan.
There are many stories about women who overcame sexist hometowns to become sports legends, but Toorpakai’s case was extreme: she grew up in Waziristan, an extremely traditional region where women are routinely stoned to death for transgressions. Yet the exhilarating first chapter shows the author defiantly burning her dresses and slashing off her long hair. Toorpakai was a born athlete, and her skills as a squash player helped her escape. But her game of choice is less important to her tale than the brutality of her homeland. Before she ever picked up a racket, the author witnessed a savage execution and several coldblooded homicides. She received a beating from a mullah and was called a “dirty girl” because she liked soccer. Toorpakai might have met a tragic fate, but her father was shockingly progressive: a gentle and good-humored professor, he encouraged his daughter to identify as a boy. “Life as a boy was beautiful,” she writes, “without silk ribbons or beaded dresses or long, black braids. It was a bold and rugged beauty….It was sweat-soaked T-shirts and my brother’s cast-off shorts.” But as Toorpakai succeeded on the court, she roused dangerous enemies. Threatened by Taliban killers, she was rescued by Canadian squash champion Jonathan Power. Unlike so many sports memoirs, Toorpakai and co-author Holstein write eloquently about Pashtun life, and the prose is often poetic and even mystical. For the author, becoming a pro athlete has been a matter of life and death. “It’s not about playing anymore, Maria,” her father said just before her first tournament. “It’s about staying alive.” The book ends abruptly with her arrival in Canada, but it seems clear that Toorpakai’s real life is just beginning.
A vivid personal account of a courageous young woman standing up to one of the world’s most oppressive theocracies.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-9141-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
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
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