A provocative, well-told story of love at all costs and an incisive examination of the continued violation of women’s rights...
A Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist’s account of how two young Afghanis from warring ethnic clans risked disgrace and death to wed each other.
When Zakia, a Tajik and Sunni Muslim, met Ali, a Hazara and Shia Muslim, both were children growing up in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan. Though they came from different cultural and religious backgrounds, the pair and their families intermingled freely. But their lives and destinies changed drastically when the two fell in love as teenagers. With keen and nuanced insight, Nordland details the tortuous road that Zakia and Ali traveled in the years that followed. The pair carried on a secret courtship and decided to marry in defiance of Islamic law. At first, they attempted to work within the constraints of cultural traditions that dictated the father choose his daughter’s husband. However, the lovers realized that running away would be the only way they could be together. As their relationship intensified, they—and especially Zakia—endured beatings and other forms of humiliation at the hands of their families. Their case went to courts in Bamiyan and then Kabul, where it garnered both national and international media attention. By that point, Zakia and Ali had managed to elope and go into hiding. Outraged by her actions, Zakia’s father and brothers swore to hunt down the missing girl and kill her to restore family honor. Nordland became the pair’s chronicler in the United States and, later, their unofficial protector when, straining the limits of his professional involvement with them, he began to help the pair financially. Meticulously reported and written, Nordland’s book is an exceptionally well-delineated glimpse into the marriage practices of a closed patriarchal society and the suffering it has caused women. The author thoughtfully considers the extent to which the West, acting from the outside, can effect social reform in Muslim fundamentalist cultures.
A provocative, well-told story of love at all costs and an incisive examination of the continued violation of women’s rights in Afghanistan.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-237882-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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