A compelling account of the tragic fate of a creative woman who might have excelled brilliantly in any other milieu.
An investigation of the “honor killing” of a young Pakistani social media star at the hands of her own family.
In her first book, Maher (Al Jazeera, Buzzfeed, etc.) delves deeply into the brief life of Qandeel Baloch (1990-2016), discovering a desperate attempt to assert agency regarding her own fate in a society determined to silence her. Baloch, who was born Fouzia Azeem in the poor village of Shah Sadar Din, in southern Punjab, was strangled by her brother, Waseem, in her parents’ home. Baloch had been branded the Pakistani Kim Kardashian, and she had perfected a social media persona that gained her hundreds of thousands of followers. But along with the followers, there were also plenty of detractors who believed her too risqué and scandalous for the clannish society in which women had little chance of emancipation. After an early failed marriage, single motherhood, and significant social media success, Baloch, apparently, went too far, baiting the ruling Islamic clerics and moral arbiters and alarming her family—even though she paid her parents’ rent and periodically gave money to Waseem. Indeed, thanks to her stardom, Baloch became the family’s cash cow. In addition to Baloch’s story, Maher examines the parallel experiences of young Pakistani women cast adrift by family and severed marriages. Most of these women must try anything to make a living, including working in the modeling industry, where they are at the mercy of brutal handlers, brokers, and managers. “In the year before Qandeel was murdered,” writes the author, “933 women and men were killed for ‘honor’ in Pakistan”—and “those are only the number of cases that were reported by family and friends.” Maher also explores the role of the media in Baloch’s death, which provided both an insatiable audience and sanctimonious jury, and speculates on whether justice will ever be served.
A compelling account of the tragic fate of a creative woman who might have excelled brilliantly in any other milieu.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61219-840-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
