Ebrahim turns Auden’s cautionary words on evil upside down with this brief but moving “portrait of a young man who was...
The inspiring story of a peace advocate who was raised in the dogma of hate but chose a different path.
With the assistance of journalist Giles, Ebrahim conjures a child’s voice as he tells the story of his life thus far. The book opens with a shock: The author is 7 years old, living in New Jersey, and it’s the middle of the night. His mother is shaking him awake and telling him to pack his things; there’s been an accident, someone is hurt, and they must go to a hospital in Brooklyn. It turns out that his father, El-Sayyid Nosair, has assassinated Meir Kahane, leader of the Jewish Defense League, and is a protégé of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the fundamentalist “Blind Sheik.” Later, Ebrahim’s father was also convicted of helping plot the first World Trade Center bombing from prison. Throughout the book, the author is all youthful anxiety: confused, fearful, bullied, angry, self-loathing. Despite the clarity of the writing, these emotions are experienced through a glass darkly and are spooky to the point of chilling. Ebrahim explains how easy it is to implant bigotry in children: “Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Pi equals 3.14. All Jews are evil, and homosexuality is an abomination. Paris is the capital of France.” They sound like facts; a child can’t tell the difference, and they fear the “other.” As the author notes, bigotry is “such a maddeningly perfect circle.” Ebrahim could easily have trod that path, but his mother was a counterforce, somehow teaching her son empathy, and she stunned him with six simple words: “I’m so sick of hating people.”
Ebrahim turns Auden’s cautionary words on evil upside down with this brief but moving “portrait of a young man who was raised in the fires of fanaticism and embraced nonviolence instead.”Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8480-9
Page Count: 112
Publisher: TED/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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