An earnest but fairly unskilled rendering of a humanitarian worker's trials and tribulations in Afghanistan.
An activist’s candid account of the hardships she endured working as a human rights officer for the United Nations.
In 2006, Elliott arrived in Herat, Afghanistan, thinking she had finally gotten her “dream job.” But Herat proved every bit as challenging as Kabul, the city where she had been stationed before. Just one month after her arrival, she was called upon to defuse an explosive situation between two feuding tribes that erupted after the leader of one tribe was assassinated. Elliott was soon mired in the thorny politics of both her job and the region. U.N. bureaucracy on one side and the machinations of desperate Afghan officials on the other made the task of getting humanitarian aid to people in need extremely difficult. For a while, Elliott seemed to thrive on the excitement created by coping with challenges that “seemed well beyond [her].” But soon, the accumulated weight of years working in war zones, including the Gaza Strip, began to take its toll on her. She suffered from insomnia, anxiety and despair, and a romantic relationship with a fellow aid worker slowly fell apart. Worse still, Elliott began questioning whether her tireless work was genuinely helping anyone. Desperate to regain her balance, she turned to yoga, a practice that helped her come to terms with the personal limits she had ignored in her zeal to make a difference in the world. Elliott describes her experiences with an open-heartedness that is admirable, but her memoir tells more than it shows and often reads more like an interesting field report than a fully realized book.
An earnest but fairly unskilled rendering of a humanitarian worker's trials and tribulations in Afghanistan.Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8111-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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