bookshelf

GULLALI OF PANJSHIR VALLEY

Name: GULLALI OF PANJSHIR VALLEY
Author: Zia Rehman
ISBN: 978-0-9861599-0-9

A NOVEL

by Zia Rehman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2015

A deeply informative tale of a nation’s history, told through the eyes of an uncommon woman.

bookshelf

An ambitious debut novel focuses on the sufferings and struggles of an Afghan woman and her family in a time of war.

The little village of Jabal os Siraj, deep in Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley, has—like all of the country—been forced to rebuild itself again and again after repeated invasions across thousands of years of imperial wars. The history of this fictionalized valley and the nation that surrounds it is the subject of this story by author and women’s rights activist Rehman (Car Grease for the Camel: A Road Journey Across Afghanistan, 2006). Here we meet Gullali Haider, a bright-eyed and bighearted girl who falls in love, fights to marry the man of her choice, and learns the hard way that “nothing is more threatening to the Taliban than an educated woman.” Gullali grows up in a village where women “do not expose their legs for fear of gunfights” and where, “for men, a handgun or a rifle is a standard jewel.” After a misadventure involving a firearm ruins her wedding and her new husband’s orchard is bombed into ashes, Gullali hits the road to try to find her fortune in a region where blood flows freely in the streets. Throughout the course of her travels and traumas, the history of her homeland is recounted to the reader in some detail, sometimes by the author himself (in the form of chapterlong monologues about Afghanistan’s racial makeup, for example, or about the Russian invasion of 1979) and sometimes in the form of lectures by Gullali’s father, a former Kandahar professor and healthy skeptic of Islamic fundamentalism. By the time the last page is turned, readers should have a fine understanding of why it is impossible, as one character laments, “to pull this country out of antiquity.” Such history lessons, though excellent in themselves, tend to pull the reader away from the emotional center of the story and occupy space Rehman might have used to deepen readers’ understanding of his characters. But this is a small complaint. Otherwise, readers interested to know why America had (and continues to have) such trouble in this far-off place—and what the real people who live in the midst of all that turmoil are really like—would be well-advised to pick up a copy.

A deeply informative tale of a nation’s history, told through the eyes of an uncommon woman.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-9861599-0-9

Page Count: 262

Publisher: Ursa Major LLC

Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

- SEEN & HEARD
The Snowy Day Is NYC Library’s Most Popular Book

- SEEN & HEARD
ALA Releases List of 2020’s Most Challenged Books

- SEEN & HEARD
NYT Readers Voting on Best Book of Past 125 Years

bookshelf

LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

bookshelf

This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.