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
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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