Ibrahim’s bold firsthand account is powerful testimony to resilience and survival in the face of a kind of warfare that is...
A memoir of abduction and sexual slavery at the hands of the Islamist Boko Haram militant group.
Ibrahim grew up in northern Nigeria, where Christians and Muslims have long lived in a sometimes-uneasy truce for generations. Her household, like most, was poor; her father made and sold fly swatters, and if sales were bad “he would guiltily ask my mother to beg for alms outside the churches in the surrounding villages so that we wouldn’t starve.” Things got a little better when Ibrahim married, but then her husband was cut down in a Boko Haram killing, as were other Christians, even as young Christian girls were spirited off to the forest and pressed into servitude. Writing with political journalist Hoffmann (co-author: The Girl Who Escaped ISIS, 2016, etc.), Ibrahim offers a cleareyed view of the sociology underlying this sexual slavery: in a place where unemployment is rampant and jobs few, young men lack the wherewithal to support a household, and for them, “the prospect of a bride as the spoils of war is highly enticing.” Never mind that the bride may already be married. Ibrahim, twice married, was pregnant when Boko Haram fighters stole her from her village, a fact that she had to disguise from them and that complicated her eventual homecoming, since children born of kidnappings “often disappear without a trace,” the feeling being that Boko Haram genes must be exterminated. The narrative takes unexpected turns at several points, including humane behavior on the part of the confused young fighter to whom she was pledged and who told her, “if you don’t marry me, then marry someone else. No woman who refuses will be left alive.”
Ibrahim’s bold firsthand account is powerful testimony to resilience and survival in the face of a kind of warfare that is becoming ever more common, its terror visited mostly on women.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-849-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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