An eloquently searching and intelligent memoir.
A Bangladesh-born author, actor, and speaker tells the story of her search for self-acceptance and a life lived across continents.
Zaman grew up watching her brilliant, college-educated mother fold in on herself “like an origami bird.” Her father, a Zamindar from a politically prominent Bangladeshi family, expressed his love harshly and bullied her mother. He moved the family from Bangladesh to Hawaii and then Thailand in pursuit of his career with the United Nations. From him, the author learned that men dictated what women could and could not do. From a male cousin who went unpunished for trying to molest her, she learned that men could sexually abuse women and not face any consequences. Zaman eventually rebelled by cutting her hair short, becoming anorexic, and sleeping with men of her choosing. She left for college in the United States, studying theater and women’s studies, and then went to New York with aspirations to become a stage actor. Meanwhile, her mother, who had procured a career of her own, divorced her father and remarried a man who respected her independence. The author married as well, but her husband was “unkind and often dangerous,” just like most of her old lovers. She divorced him and began mending the difficult relationship she had with her father. Cautious of involvements, Zaman fell in love with a self-help guru who believed that an “alpha [male]” should never let a woman “feel too secure in his affections for her.” After leaving him, the author went to Oregon to live with her mother and stepfather and “get myself sorted.” Within the space of the loving family she never had, the author let go of her inner disciplinarian and began writing to understand—and ultimately release—the self who had been her “imaginary best friend.” In this candid book, Zaman not only celebrates her quest to define herself and her voice, but also to find health, self-love, and wholeness.
An eloquently searching and intelligent memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948705-11-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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