An honest, passionate account of a refugee family’s terrible losses that should inspire, as the author hopes, others to...
A Syrian refugee family's attempt to cross the sea results in tragedy.
Millions of people have seen the heartbreaking photograph of Alan Kurdi: a young boy lying in the sand, dead at the edge of the sea. Appallingly, Alan is just one of thousands of Syrians who have died in a desperate effort to flee their shattered, war-torn country. In this gripping, emotionally charged account, Tima Kurdi, Alan’s British Columbia–based activist aunt, shares her family's story and the events that led to this horrific moment, in which everything changed not only personally, but also globally, as the world finally became aware of the plight of hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Although readers know the outcome of the story from the beginning, the suspense and anxiety are all that much greater as the author details the beautiful family life she shared with her siblings in Syria, filled with laughter, good food, and a strong sense of culture and pride. The war began after Kurdi had married and moved to Canada, and the family's peaceful existence quickly became a nightmare for her brothers and sisters who remained behind, as they suffered humiliation, deprivations, and even torture. Desperate for food, work, and shelter, her extended family broke apart, some traveling over land to safer countries and others choosing to risk crossing the Mediterranean from Turkey to Greece on flimsy rubber rafts filled past maximum capacity by the smugglers they hired. The ending of the author’s tale is shocking. Three members of her extended family died trying to reach a better life. Though they lost their lives, their names—Alan, Ghalib, and Rehanna—live on in this tribute to them and to all the Syrians who have lost loved ones and their homes due to the civil war that still plagues their homeland.
An honest, passionate account of a refugee family’s terrible losses that should inspire, as the author hopes, others to speak “for all the people who have no voice.”Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982108-51-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2018
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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