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LIGHT OF THE CRESCENT MOON

AN UNDERCOVER JOURNEY TO THE SOUL OF RADICAL ISLAM

Solid reading for comparative religions, current events and the clash of civilizations.

An eye-opening look into the abyss: the great yawning gulf that lies between the true believer and the infidel.

Padnos (My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun: Adolescents at the Apocalypse: A Teacher’s Notes, 2004) quit teaching for journalism—as a writer for a Yemeni newspaper, a venue that allowed him ample opportunity to study Islam and examine its effects on those around him. Many of the Yemenis he met in the madrassas and on the streets were ill-informed, bigoted, pious prudes. One naïve young man he encountered in an Internet café insisted, for instance, that America is a country of “corruption and Jews.” A teacher assured him that Jews mispronounce the Arabic greeting salaam aleikum so that it does not mean “peace upon you”: “It may sound that way, sort of, but it means poison upon you . . . and you won’t hear the difference.” Most seemed sure of a Muslim ascendancy, a world under the crescent and the veil, and if they tended to treat Padnos indulgently as a Muslim convert, he is less patient with them. Considering what he has learned toward the end of his adventures and misadventures in the backwaters where al-Qaeda trains and Wahhabism reigns, he thinks, “In Yemen you will learn how to hate the Jews and how to control women. If you come back [to the West] five years from now . . . with your head stuffed with Koran, and hadith . . . you’ll be a person stranded in the modern world.” Anyone who wishes to understand why they hate us will realize that one major component is ignorance. Yet, as Padnos also writes, there are surely reasons to complain—even if it’s not strictly true, as one sheikh insists, that “the Americans came into Iraq with crosses on their tanks.”

Solid reading for comparative religions, current events and the clash of civilizations.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007

ISBN: 978-1-4039-7636-9

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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