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 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
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