A raw, terrifying account of religious genocide and life in captivity under the Islamic State by a young Yazidi woman who survived it.
Born and raised in Kocho, Iraq, Murad grew up hearing about the many genocides her people faced throughout history, but she never imagined she would witness one herself. She enjoyed a quiet childhood in her small farming village, surrounded by a large, loving extended family and the tightknit Yazidi community. But just outside the town limits, danger lingered as Daesh, otherwise known as the Islamic State, began to take control of northern Iraq. Murad was 21 years old when, in August 2014, IS militants laid siege to Kocho and irreparably changed the lives of everyone in the town. After their village leader announced that his people refused to convert to Islam despite threats of violence and death, Kocho's men were rounded up, shot, and buried in mass graves while their mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, and young sons watched from a schoolhouse window before being transported to an even grimmer fate. Older women, such as Murad's mother, were later murdered, young boys were forced into IS, and the girls and younger women like the author were sold into the IS slave trade, where they were subjected to a daily routine of servitude, violence, and rape. Held captive by a group of particularly brutal militants, Murad attempted to flee once before she was able to escape with the help of one remarkable family willing to risk their lives to save hers. With vivid detail and genuine, heartbreaking emotion, the author lays bare not only her unimaginable tragedy, but also the tragedies of an entire people whose plight is largely ignored by the rest of the world. Human rights lawyer and activist Amal Clooney provides the foreword.
A devastating yet ultimately inspiring memoir that doubles as an urgent call to action.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6043-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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