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
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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