A raw and impassioned account of the making of a young feminist.
From Bangladesh-born writer, doctor, and death fatwa recipient, a searing account of growing up in a dysfunctional family beleaguered by religious intolerance.
Colorful details of food and landscape offer some relief in an otherwise grim tale of unhappiness and fanaticism. Nasrin’s story begins in the early 1970s as her family flees their provincial home for refuge with relatives in the countryside. Her country, the former east Pakistan, is fighting, with India’s help, to gain independence from west Pakistan. After the war, in the newly independent Bangladesh, Nasrin, born in 1962, describes her family: two older brothers and a younger sister; her parents (her father, a farmer’s son, became a doctor and married the daughter of the man who helped him financially); and her maternal grandparents (a spendthrift dictatorial grandfather and a grandmother determined to save money and food for her family). The writing is personal and understandably angry, although this is its weakness, since Nasrin seems to imply—without giving any wider context for readers to judge by—that the horrors she details are universal: her sexual abuse by two uncles when she was five and seven; beatings by her father; her mother’s increasingly erratic behavior; and the arranged marriages of talented school friends to much older men. Nasrin attributes her growing feminism and religious skepticism to what she observes on entering adolescence: a mother who had dreamed of going to college but became a religious zealot, reviling education and women’s rights (although, paradoxically, her father is determined that Nasrin be educated); her father’s philandering; her mother’s cruel treatment of female servants; hypocritical men who use religion to abuse and confine women; the Faithful, who discount all scientific knowledge; and limited freedom for women (a walk along the river ends in an assault). By 14, Nasrin had become critical of her family, her country, and her faith.
A raw and impassioned account of the making of a young feminist.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58642-051-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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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