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
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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