Forged in justifiable anger, this flamethrower of a book will hold the reader’s attention with its heat, but it occasionally...
A Syrian-born psychiatrist argues that “Muslims hate their women…because their god does.”
In 2006, Sultan gave an interview on Al-Jazeera in which she condemned militant Islam as barbaric and predicted its eventual demise. The author writes that she received death threats in response, while Muslim moderates praised her candor. Her first book is a stew of insightful critique and questionable generalizations, informed by her bitter memories of her upbringing in Syria, where, she says, religion sanctioned the treatment of women as little better than dogs. Her psychiatrist’s diagnosis is that Islam’s birth in a harsh desert environment, where survival was a constant struggle, imbued its adherents with a primal, despairing anger that they’ve never discarded. She’s not the first to argue that the refusal to separate church and state in Muslim countries is a fundamental reason for their political repression and poor living conditions. Nor can her criticism of misogyny in some of those countries be disputed. Yet she drops broad bombshells about Muslims that are sure to be highly controversial. Sultan criticizes Colin Powell because he sees nothing wrong with electing a Muslim president, even though “Islam is not just a religion: It is a political doctrine that imposes itself by force.” Though she stresses that she has no “anti-Muslim prejudice,” she adds that “Muslims...can be either good or bad, and the best among them do not act in accordance with the teachings of their religion.” The author also claims that no Muslim, regardless of education or professed tolerance, “can free himself completely of his suspicions when circumstances bring him into contact with members of these two religions [Christianity and Judaism].” Critics may argue that it’s the intent of the believer, not the belief, that matters.
Forged in justifiable anger, this flamethrower of a book will hold the reader’s attention with its heat, but it occasionally singes targets indiscriminately.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-53835-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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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