A middling as-told-to memoir, but of some interest to students of recent history—and to intelligence experts, who might want...
He was a quiet man, a good neighbor, kept to himself—until he went funny in the head and took on the Great Satan.
It may have been an incident at the Indianapolis airport that set Osama bin Laden on his long quest to destroy the United States. Recounts Najwa bin Laden, first cousin and first wife of Osama (“It is common for Muslim women to marry their first cousins”), it was then that a blithering yahoo stared belligerently at the veiled women, “curious eyes growing as large as big bugs popping from his skull,” even as her tall, imposing husband sat beside her. But the hatred took time to build, as Osama became first a jihadist and then a terrorist—and, along the way, a father to many children and husband to other women besides Najwa. The fourth child was co-author Omar, who picks up Najwa’s story with somewhat less inclination to psychologizing. Omar is instead often defiant, particularly when dad suggests that all good boys his age ought to be signing up for suicide-bombing detail. “I was turning out to be a disappointment,” writes Omar, “a son who did not want the mantle of power, who wanted peace, not war.” Peace was not in the cards, of course. The bin Ladens recount assassination attempts, constant escapes, secretive relocations to new homes and countries and the occasional lobbed cruise missile. The two logged time in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, before, by Najwa’s account, she was allowed to return to her family in Syria. Omar left separately, just in time to get out before the events of 9/11 and the arrival of American forces in Afghanistan.
A middling as-told-to memoir, but of some interest to students of recent history—and to intelligence experts, who might want to have a chat with the authors about the layout of the Tora Bora caves.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-56016-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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