Law student Ahmari and Weddady, civil rights outreach director of the American Islamic Congress, present the “most compelling voices” from an essay competition they organized shortly after Lebanon's Cedar Revolution in 2005.
The online competition was designed to give a means of expression to individuals under the age of 25 looking to find their voices on issues of religious and political freedom and human rights. During a five-year period, the editors received more than 8,000 essays from 22 countries in four languages. Each year the writers were asked to share either an example of the “pain of repression,” or concrete projects designed to strengthen civil rights or dreams of a better future. As a byproduct the process also opened pathways to recruit activists. The editors present the essays under three headings: “Trapped,” “Unequal” and “Breaking Through.” The views expressed by the essayists reflect an impressively diverse cross-section of the Middle Eastern world. From Iran came contributions from the Baha’i and the Sunni religious minorities. The Baha’i are not allowed to participate in Iran's educational institutions, and Sunni ways of praying are banned in Shia Iran. The appeal for religious freedom also came from Saudi Arabia, where a student explores her process of standing up for herself against a repressive teacher. Also included are horrifying accounts of fundamentalist violence from Algeria and pleas for Western-style freedoms for homosexuals, along with accounts of the persecution of women.
A slim volume that successfully presents “treasures, surprises, and rewards.”Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-230-11592-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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