A searingly honest, profoundly courageous memoir of one fearless woman’s fight for her homeland.
A politician and activist recounts the personal and political effects of the rise and fall of the Taliban in her native country of Afghanistan.
Born in 1994, Ghafari was “raised during the Taliban’s first regime” and “came of age in the era following 2001, as a supposedly democratic government was being propped up by Western armies, aid organisations, and billions of dollars.” Although she loved going to school, the Taliban’s increasing presence in Paktia, the province in the Tora Bora mountains where her father was working, made it dangerous for girls to receive an education. It was so dangerous, in fact, that her father forbade her from attending school, a directive she ignored until she found herself in the path of a suicide bomber while sneaking to school against her father’s orders. Despite this traumatizing experience, which also included a skull injury caused by shrapnel from the explosion, she continued to secretly attend school. She was only able to finish her schooling through a scholarship to Chandigarh, India, where, after intense study, she learned enough to return to Afghanistan and pass a rigorous examination process that resulted in her appointment as the mayor of Wardak. In that role, Ghafari diligently battled corruption until her father’s murder made her fear for her family’s safety and forced her to transfer to the defense ministry in Kabul. Soon after, the Taliban invaded, forcing Ghafari and her loved ones to flee the country. This harrowing journey plunged her into depression but also spurred her into activism. The author tells her inspiring life story with sincerity and passion, providing a nuanced and, at times, horrifying glimpse into Afghanistan’s devastating history. The last two chapters are particularly gripping, as Ghafari chronicles the physical and emotional chaos that enveloped the country after the withdrawal of American troops in 2021.
A searingly honest, profoundly courageous memoir of one fearless woman’s fight for her homeland.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5417-0263-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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