Heartfelt and inspiring.
Winning memoir by a Sufi rock musician determined to encourage harmony between the West and the Muslim world.
Now in his mid-40s, Ahmad grew up in a privileged family in Lahore, Pakistan, attended an elite school and in 1978 joined his first rock band as a Beatles-loving teenager in suburban Tappan, N.Y. His father was an airline executive, his paternal grandfather secretary to the governor of Punjab. Early on, he writes, he decided he wanted no part of being elite if it meant keeping the poor down. At 18, he returned with his family to a Pakistan ruled by a dictator who considered Western rock sinful. When student extremists disrupted his performance with a Lahore high-school band, Ahmad vowed to “wage a rock and roll jihad” to encourage “a cosmic oneness that sees no cultural boundaries.” He later graduated from medical school but has never practiced. The book traces his rise to fame as a member of two of South Asia’s most popular rock groups—Vital Signs and Junoon—and his intense quest for meaning through musical exploration. He describes his friendship with Pakistani cricket star Imran Khan and the evening he took American cricket fan Mick Jagger on a visit to Lahore’s red-light district to see the dancing girls. Ahmad evokes life in Pakistan under recent repressive regimes and shows how both rock music and cricket served as outlets for young people yearning for freedom and democracy. By the late ’90s, Ahmad reached a worldwide audience with his present band, Junoon, which the New York Times’s Jon Pareles called “an Asian answer to Santana.” The group toured the United States and performed at the General Assembly of the United Nations, where Ahmad now serves as a goodwill ambassador. Taking his credo from the Sufi maxim “When you see with the heart, all the masks fall down,” Ahmad has worked to improve relations between Pakistan and India, and in 2008 he wrote the peace song “Ring the Bells” with Melissa Etheridge, who provides the book’s introduction.
Heartfelt and inspiring.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9767-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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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