A culturally rich and rewarding personal chronicle of ethnic faith and intermingled tradition.
A heartfelt memoir plumbs the multilayered experience of being Muslim in America.
With a steady infusion of verve and personality, Rehman immerses readers in the traditions of a Middle Eastern culture in which prearranged adolescent marriages (including her own) are not uncommon. In 1971, the author, the accommodating daughter of a lieutenant colonel, arrived in the United States as a 20-year-old Pakistani, planning only to remain in America for two years while her charming, charismatic husband, Khalid, finished his medical residency. Rehman appropriately counters lavish descriptions of gilded pre-wedding rituals and the pageantry of the matrimonial ceremony with discussions of the culture clash as her new life in New York City began. Her tendency to inject plucky, italicized interior asides, however, has the uneven narrative effect of being both whimsical and interruptive. Self-indulgences aside, the author writes candidly about feeling insulted when American women questioned the validity of her predestined marriage or the culture-contradictory ideas of nursing homes for elderly family members. Holidays and childbirth proved more complicated and further loosened Rehman’s grip on her religion, and later, she faced the challenge of incorporating Islamic religion into the lives of her Americanized children. Though she stringently resisted her own Americanization, 44 years later, Rehman remains a content citizen with a career in hospital administration, years dedicated to women’s equality, and an executive position at an Islamic multifaith organization, which, the author rivetingly details, faced an anti-Islamic backlash for their participation in the construction of a Muslim mosque blocks from the 9/11 site in downtown Manhattan. In her closing remarks, the author reflects on the contemporary shift taking place within her culture, her hopes for continued cultural pluralism in America, and the need for safe community spaces for immigrants “where we can be wholly Muslim and wholly American.” Rehman's memoir offers a deeper understanding and appreciation for Muslim lifestyles while imparting a message of unity and international fellowship.
A culturally rich and rewarding personal chronicle of ethnic faith and intermingled tradition.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62872-663-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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