Eye-opening chronicle of cultural exchange.
Memoir about growing up in war-torn Afghanistan by an Afghan refugee who joined the jihad against the Soviets and later studied at Harvard.
The only son of a well-educated mechanical engineer who worked for an oil and gas company near Sheberghan, Farivar was nine when the Soviets invaded in 1979. Since his father was fiercely anti-Soviet, the family fled the country and settled in Peshawar, Pakistan, where Farivar attended a madrassa and received full indoctrination in Koranic and Arabic teaching. Fired up to join the jihad, he returned to Afghanistan and joined the mujahideen base at Tora Bora in the late ’80s. As the war was winding down, Farivar met a curious Mexican-Greek journalist, Karimullah, who was impressed by the author’s scholarly bent and encouraged him to apply to Harvard. He studied for a year at Lawrenceville Prep before landing at Harvard, and he humorously describes the culture shock he encountered in his first visit to America. Despite his campus legend as the “Afghan freedom fighter,” Farivar maintained a low profile. He shaved his beard, moved to New York and tried to find work and a green card, just as the Taliban began their ascendancy. The end of the book is a bit vague, as the author notes he worked as a “roving war correspondent” and his immigration status was imperiled after 9/11. Following several trips back to Afghanistan, he recognized that his heart was there and that “only when Afghan refugees in Pakistan return to Afghanistan can there be stability in Afghanistan.” Finally, Farivar returned in 2007 for an extended stay to assist Afghan journalists in Kabul, and he leaves his memoir as open-ended as the fragile state of his country.
Eye-opening chronicle of cultural exchange.Pub Date: March 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-87113-982-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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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