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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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