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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
