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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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