by Norma Khouri ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2003
An eye-opening indictment of Islam as “a totalitarian regime operating under the guise of a religion” and of the...
Speaking on behalf of her murdered friend, a Jordanian woman bravely defies Islamic fundamentalism and repudiates her homeland.
Although it is held to be one of the more moderate Islamic nations, “for most women,” writes debut author Khouri, “Jordan is a stifling prison tense with the risk of death at the hands of loved ones.” Her case in point is a tale of her friend Dalia, whose parents, like Khouri’s, “never showed a hint of ambition for us, beyond marriage.” When the two young women opened a hair salon in Amman, one of their first customers was a handsome young officer in the Royal Guard, obviously attracted to Dalia’s beauty (the product, Khouri wistfully writes, of “ancient Greco-Roman genes”). Dalia was similarly attracted, but there was a problem: Michael, the young major, was Catholic, and inter-religious romance is strictly forbidden by custom—if not law—in much of the Islamic world. The two conducted a secret romance involving much subterfuge, document forgery, and dangerous liaisons in off-the-path hotels; they planned to leave Jordan together for Europe—no easy thing, writes Khouri, inasmuch as a single woman is forbidden to travel without the express consent of her father. Dalia’s father not only would not have consented, but, when he finally learned of the affair, he stabbed her to death, raging, “What did she think? That my home is a house of whoredom?” Having committed a “crime of honor,” the father was exonerated. This acquittal is perfectly in keeping, Khouri holds, with Islamic society’s privileging of men and degradation of women. After all, she writes, as late as August 2001, a former Jordanian minister of justice remarked of honor killings in the case of rape: “All women killed in cases of honor are prostitutes. I believe prostitutes deserve to die.”
An eye-opening indictment of Islam as “a totalitarian regime operating under the guise of a religion” and of the mistreatment of women in the modern Arab world.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-4878-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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
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