An eloquent celebration of survival even as it explores the darkness of despair. (b&w photos)
An inspiring, disquieting history of her homeland—personal, political, polemical—by an Afghan woman now living in Canada.
Best known for her journalism and the films Kandahar and Return to Kandahar, Pazira recalls among her earliest childhood memories a visit to her father (a physician and political activist) at a detention center in 1978, when she was only five. He was eventually released, but the family lived in fear and was subjected to constant harassment. The Paziras endured the Soviet invasion; their initial elation at the rise of mujahidin was soon followed by dismay and disillusionment with the harshness of these anti-Soviet fighters. The author’s description and analysis of the mujahidin’s sanguinary strategies serves uncomfortably well to explain the current behavior of Iraqi insurgents as well. By firing rockets into their own neighborhoods, she avers, the mujahidin aimed to show people in a most horrible way that the Soviets could never protect them. Following the emergence of the Taliban, the Paziras realized they must leave their homeland, which no longer welcomed—or even tolerated—people with liberal political, religious and social views. The most gripping passages deal with their escape in 1989. After bribing border guards and dulcifying military patrols, they finally got into Pakistan, but living conditions were so miserable that they eventually emigrated to Canada, which welcomed them as political refugees. The author continued her education there, then returned to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban to discover that the lives of ordinary people remained miserable despite, or even because of, the U.S. military presence. Pazira’s most wrenching discovery concerned the fate of her long-time friend Dyana, a young woman who had stayed behind and eventually succumbed to despair. In another affecting segment, the author goes to Russia to interview people touched by the Afghan war.
An eloquent celebration of survival even as it explores the darkness of despair. (b&w photos)Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-8133-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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
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