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
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
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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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