A devastating yet ultimately inspiring memoir that doubles as an urgent call to action.
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. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
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