A hard-hitting message about a brutal practice that’s clearly aimed at a European audience. American readers will wonder if...
Third volume in Revlon model Dirie’s continuing campaign to bring an end to the practice of female genital mutilation.
Desert Flower (1998, not reviewed) told of the author’s personal experience with FGM as a child in Somalia and of her escape to England; it also recounted her work combating the practice in Africa as a UN Special Ambassador. Here, she examines the extent of FGM in Europe. Dirie estimates that at least half-a-million women and girls currently living in Europe have been mutilated or are at risk. She describes her travels throughout the continent interviewing women working to eradicate the practice, health workers, women who have endured FGM and doctors who perform reconstructive surgery. She paints a vivid picture of what FGM does to a woman’s body and frequently lets the victims tell in their own words of its devastating physical and psychological effects. Her text makes it clear that many of these women, though they reside in European countries, are almost completely isolated from Western culture. They may not speak the country’s language or have any knowledge of its mores or laws; they are subject to their husbands’ dictates. As a black woman and victim of FGM, Dirie made an intimate connection with her interviewees. While acknowledging that some cultural traditions dictate FGM as a prerequisite for marriage, she adamantly rejects the assertion that Islam requires it, and she demands that imams speak out against it. She also calls for better education of the general public, women at risk, social workers and health workers; for greater recognition of the crime in European judicial systems; and for increased prosecution and punishment of offenders. Appendices summarize the known facts about FGM; outline FGM legislation in various European nations; and list sources of help.
A hard-hitting message about a brutal practice that’s clearly aimed at a European audience. American readers will wonder if the problem exists within U.S. borders.Pub Date: May 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-84408-252-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Virago/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
