A gorgeously rich tapestry of an amazing life and culture.
A carpet designer and businessman's profoundly moving account of a childhood and adolescence lived amid the Afghan civil war.
When Omar was growing up in the early 1990s, his native city of Kabul was “like a huge garden.” Life was full and happy, and his only concern was besting his cousin Wakeel at kite flying. But then rival Mujahedeen factions began fighting each other, transforming the once-Edenic city into a bloody wasteland that reminded Omar of “an American horror movie.” The family sought refuge in Qala-e-Noborja, a fort on the outskirts of Kabul that a friend of Omar’s father had transformed into a lush, green compound. As rockets and gunfire exploded around them, the family planned for their return home. Omar and his father attempted to go back to the family house, only to find it occupied by sadistic soldiers who imprisoned and tortured the pair before freeing them. As the ring of terror tightened around the fort, the family fled Kabul. Their dangerous journey took them through central and northern Afghanistan, where they camped in caves located inside a giant statue of the Buddha and joined nomad relatives on their overland treks. Along the way, Omar met, and fell in love with, an older deaf-mute Turkmen girl who taught him how to weave carpets. These skills would eventually help him support his starving, demoralized family and secretly provide work to young Kabuli women who suffered under the misogynist regime of the Taliban. As lyrical as it is haunting, this mesmerizing, not-to-be-missed debut memoir is also a loving evocation of a misunderstood land and people.
A gorgeously rich tapestry of an amazing life and culture.Pub Date: April 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-15764-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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 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
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