A straightforward, loving treatise on becoming a man dedicated to uplifting women as equals.
Malala Yousafzai’s father shares the story of his life as well as how he reared his daughter to be a powerful, courageous human being.
Ziauddin Yousafzai grew up in Pakistan’s Swat Valley in a strictly patriarchal culture that deemed men more valuable than women, who were treated as little more than unpaid domestic help. Because his family had no connections or industry, the author recognized education as his best and only chance. “This is what my life has felt like: reaching towards something, finding it, and learning it from scratch,” he writes. As a teenager, he began to question the gender roles that had been ingrained in him since birth. Though unaware of the term “feminism,” he had the innate belief that women should be treated as equal. The author writes to offer encouragement and proof of the many rewards to be had when fighting for change. Faced with a serious speech impediment as a boy, he entered speaking competitions and came out victorious, to the surprise of everyone who had mocked him. The author points to positive revenge—righting wrongs without hatred—as a principle underpinning his life. As a married father, he resisted the Taliban’s attempts to shut down schools and continued running the one he had established, the Khushal School, which Malala attended. When she was treated unjustly by boys and other men, he never berated them. Instead, he led by example. “I acted upon the things I believed in,” he writes. “It is such a good starting point.” His activism and steadfast encouragement inspired Malala to follow his stand for equality. In 2012, at age 15, she spoke out against the Taliban, who retaliated by shooting her in the head. She survived and garnered worldwide fame, and she and her father continue their girls’ education campaign. The narrative is simply told but instructive, focusing attention on the importance of change beginning at an individual level.
A straightforward, loving treatise on becoming a man dedicated to uplifting women as equals.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-45050-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2018
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
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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
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