An intelligent chronicle that may have limited appeal among general readers.
An exiled Algerian freedom fighter’s account of the less-than-heroic realities undergirding the Algerian revolution.
In this memoir translated by his widow, Mokhtefi traces his evolution from a young boy steeped in Muslim traditions to a disillusioned government administrator. The son of a butcher, the author grew up in an Algerian village seething with French-Arab tensions. A schoolteacher saw Mokhtefi's intellectual gifts early on and urged him to pursue a scholarship to a school outside of his village. There, he began his assimilation into a French-dominated society he questioned for how it “deprived my parents of an education” and made him feel culturally “mutilated, bouncing back and forth between the traditional family, the village, and my life at the school and in the city.” His political consciousness emerged in high school, and he dreamed of becoming a lawyer to defend Algerian nationalists like his imprisoned brother. As the French military began mobilizing to Algeria, the young Mokhtefi found himself drawn into the murky politics that pitted rival factions of Algerian nationalists against each other. He eventually joined the National Liberation Army and trained to send and receive Morse code among men who “barely [knew] how to read and write.” Eventually promoted to a supervisory position within the signal corps, he continued to witness a toxic “climate of fear and disdain” prevail in the ALN. After accepting an administrative post in the emerging Algerian government, he watched the minister and his cabinet censor all the reports he wrote, and the justice-for-all promises of the revolution turned to ash. This detailed, at times labyrinthine eyewitness account of a revolutionary’s disillusionment with the revolution to free Algeria not only from France, but from its own lack of political enlightenment will appeal most to historians of colonization and students of political movements.
An intelligent chronicle that may have limited appeal among general readers.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63542-180-4
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
An unflinching self-portrait.
The tumultuous life of a bisexual, autistic comic.
In her debut memoir, Scottish comedian Brady recounts the emotional turmoil of living with undiagnosed autism. “The public perception of autistics is so heavily based on the stereotype of men who love trains or science,” she writes, “that many women miss out on diagnosis and are thought of as studious instead.” She was nothing if not studious, obsessively focused on foreign languages, but she found it difficult to converse in her own language. From novels, she tried to gain “knowledge about people, about how they spoke to each other, learning turns of phrase and metaphor” that others found so familiar. Often frustrated and overwhelmed by sensory overload, she erupted in violent meltdowns. Her parents, dealing with behavior they didn’t understand—including self-cutting—sent her to “a high-security mental hospital” as a day patient. Even there, a diagnosis eluded her; she was not accurately diagnosed until she was 34. Although intimate friendships were difficult, she depicts her uninhibited sexuality and sometimes raucous affairs with both men and women. “I grew up confident about my queerness,” she writes, partly because of “autism’s lack of regard for social norms.” While at the University of Edinburgh, she supported herself as a stripper. “I liked that in a strip club men’s contempt of you was out in the open,” she admits. “In the outside world, misogyny was always hovering in your peripheral vision.” When she worked as a reporter for the university newspaper, she was assigned to try a stint as a stand-up comic and write about it; she found it was work she loved. After “about a thousand gigs in grim little pubs across England,” she landed an agent and embarked on a successful career. Although Brady hopes her memoir will “make things feel better for the next autistic or misfit girl,” her anger is as evident as her compassion.
An unflinching self-portrait.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593582503
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.
Essays on current political topics by a high-profile actor and activist.
Milano explains in an introduction that she began writing this uneven collection while dealing with a severe case of Covid-19 and suffering from "persistent brain fog.” In the first essay, "On Being Unapologetically Fucked Up,” the author begins by fuming over a February 2019 incident in which she compared MAGA caps worn by high school kids to KKK hoods. She then runs through a grab bag of flash-point news items (police shootings, border crimes, sexual predators in government), deploying the F-bomb with abandon and concluding, "What I know is that fucked up is as fundamental a state of the world as night and day. But I know there is better. I know that ‘less fucked up’ is a state we can live in.” The second essay, "Believe Women," discusses Milano’s seminal role in the MeToo movement; unfortunately, it is similarly conversational in tone and predictable in content. One of the few truly personal essays, "David," about the author's marriage, refutes the old saw about love meaning never having to say you're sorry, replacing it with "Love means you can suggest a national sex strike and your husband doesn't run away screaming." Milano assumes, perhaps rightly, that her audience is composed of followers and fans; perhaps these readers will know what she is talking about in the seemingly allegorical "By Any Other Name," about her bad experience with a certain rosebush. "Holy shit, giving birth sucked," begins one essay. "Words are weird, right?" begins the next. "Welp, this is going to piss some of you off. Hang in there," opens a screed about cancel culture—though she’s entirely correct that “it’s childish, divisive, conceited, and Trumpian to its core.” By the end, however, Milano's intelligence, compassion, integrity, and endurance somewhat compensate for her lack of literary polish.
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18329-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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