Despite the unrelenting passages of human suffering, the authors offer a fascinating—and ultimately uplifting—exploration of...
The story of an Iraqi and an Iranian who became “as close as real brothers, with blended families and shared histories.”
During the horrific Battle of Khorramshahr in 1982, part of the Iran-Iraq War, Haftlang, at the age of 13, was serving as an Iranian soldier when he decided to spare the life of Iraqi soldier Aboud. Here, with the assistance of former San Francisco Chronicle features writer May, the two former enemy soldiers relate their brutal saga, which features an unexpected resolution. Readers learn about Haftlang’s brutal childhood in Iran and Aboud’s relatively prosperous existence as a restaurant/bakery manager in Iraq. After the bloody battlefield encounter in which the severely wounded Aboud would have died without the inexplicably compassionate decision by Haftlang, the combatants certainly never expected to meet again. During the extended conflict led by Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini, Haftlang and Aboud both ended up as prisoners of war. Much of the book offers graphic details about the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by the Iranians and vice versa. Certainly, some readers will find the details of torture nauseating and may need to skip ahead, but the story is worth persevering. After Haftlang and Aboud were allowed to return to their homelands following years of captivity, they discovered that their families and friends had assumed they were dead. Each man eventually found a way to immigrate to Canada, where, during a chance encounter at the Vancouver Association for the Survivors of Torture in 2001, they realized their connection on the battlefield two decades earlier. They formed a friendship transcending nationality, language differences, and age, and their tale, which alternates throughout the book, is quite remarkable.
Despite the unrelenting passages of human suffering, the authors offer a fascinating—and ultimately uplifting—exploration of cultures unknown to many readers.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68245-011-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© 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
