A staggeringly powerful story of inhumanity and one man’s unrelenting will to survive.
An innocent Syrian student is sent to a brutal prison.
From 1982 to 1994, author Khalifa spent 12 years in Tadmur, a prison located in the desert northeast of Damascus, one of the worst in the Middle East. He barely survived. Originally published in Arabic in 2006, this autobiographical novel written in diary form is about that harrowing experience. It’s excruciatingly painful to read. The narration is told in a purposefully flat, restrained prose style superbly rendered by translator Starkey. After graduating from college in Paris, Musa returns home to Syria. At the airport, he is taken away by two security guards. No reason is given, but we later learn it had to do with another student’s remarks about something critical Musa had once said about the Syrian regime. For this he will spend years in a hell on Earth. The torture begins right away. Guards, believing him to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood when he’s actually a Christian, stuff him into a car tire, exposing his bare feet and legs, and ruthlessly whip him until the skin comes off and exposes bone. “Overcome with despair and fear of an unknown fate,” he’s taken to Tadmur to join thousands of other prisoners. He’s stuffed into a 25 square meter “dormitory” with 86 others, where they spend most of their time on the floor, pressed against each others’ bodies. They are continually beaten by the guards, humiliated, and degraded; some are simply taken out to the yard and brutally executed. To maintain his sanity, “like a tortoise,” Musa retreats into his shell, where he will write his diary over and over in his mind, memorizing everything. One young man had “memorized more than thirty thousand names”—name, home, date admitted, and fate—so none would be forgotten.
A staggeringly powerful story of inhumanity and one man’s unrelenting will to survive.Pub Date: June 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56656-022-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
