A forthright, charming tale of unraveling the “overwhelming contradictions and tangles” of identity.
A sweetly self-deprecating account of enduring the arranged-marriage mill in London’s South Asian Muslim community.
At age 19, while a student at Oxford, EMEL magazine columnist and Guardian contributor Janmohamed began accepting visits by suitors to her suburban home, where she lived with her parents, well-educated professionals who had emigrated from Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania (the author’s great-grandparents hailed from Gujarat, India). As a young woman from a relatively religious home who chose to wear hijab, the author knew she had to submit to the matchmaking process, which was run by the local mosque’s Marriage Committee and a handful of well-intentioned but meddlesome “Buxom Aunties.” However, Janmohamed, like her smart, modern girlfriends, also held out for true love. By rejecting numerous unsuitable matches over the years, she put herself in jeopardy of ending up without a husband, while also remaining true to herself and hoping to find a more “Divine Love.” Her account of having to meet the succession of suitors—frequently unsavory, reluctant or downright rude—is hilarious. One businessman informed the well-read student that he hated books and “people who like books”; another appeared two hours late for their appointment so he could finish watching a cricket match on television; others rejected her for being too short and for wearing the headscarf. The author devotes several chapters to a defense of hijab, especially after the open resentment of Muslims after 9/11. She emphasizes the equalitarianism endorsed by the Koran and that the choice to wear a headscarf marks her faith and feminism at the same time. As she moved through her 20s and the Aunties continued to fret, Janmohamed resolved not to let the matchmaking distract her from her “inner world,” and she embarked on a climb of Kilimanjaro and a hajj to Mecca. The author’s journey is less about finding a husband than resolving the contradictions inherent in being a Muslim woman in Western society.
A forthright, charming tale of unraveling the “overwhelming contradictions and tangles” of identity.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0080-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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