An essential eyewitness account, and with luck an inaugural document in a Syrian literature that is uncensored and unchained.
Haunting memoir of an unwanted season in the hellish combat of civil war.
Syrian writer and filmmaker Yazbek, a member of the literary movement called the Beirut39, will be new to most readers outside the Middle East. Both beautifully written—sometimes incongruously so, given the subject matter—and relentless, her narrative opens with the heady days of the Arab Spring, when the rulers of Tunisia and Egypt were giving way to popular uprisings and the edifice of Syria’s security state was being shaken by an awakened people. “They could not and would not believe that this army of slaves, whom they called ‘insects’ or ‘rats,’ could ever rise up against them,” writes the Syrian-German novelist Rafik Schami in his foreword of the stunningly corrupt Assad regime. But on March 15 of last year, the “slaves” did revolt. The regime hit back hard, spraying crowds of unarmed, peaceful demonstrators with bullets. As Yazbek writes, almost by way of prelude to this terrible chronicle of events experienced firsthand, “Death is no longer a question. Death is a window we open up to our questions.” Death is also a constant, grim companion in these pages; it drew close as undercover agents interrogated and harassed Yazbek, receding as, eventually, she fled the country. The images she paints are indelible, pictures of “men on their stomachs in handcuffs, humiliated and insulted,” and of youngsters defiantly baring their chests to the security police before being gunned down. “Sure, I was panicked,” she writes, “but through that panic I learned how to cultivate a dark patch in my heart, a zone that no one can reach, one that remains fixed, where not even death can penetrate.”
An essential eyewitness account, and with luck an inaugural document in a Syrian literature that is uncensored and unchained.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-908323-12-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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