Bashir clearly tries to distance himself from the mess. No dice, but these up-close notes are useful in understanding the...
An apologetic memoir of life in a bloody tyrant’s hip pocket.
People behave strangely in dictatorships. Take the instance, by the account of Saddam Hussein’s personal physician Bashir, when Uday Hussein replied to his valet’s backtalk by cracking his head open. Saddam was none too happy: “I’ll throttle him with my own hands!” he yelled, calming down only when an advisor reminded him that killing his own son wouldn’t bring the dead valet back to life. Doubtless many of the women whom Uday picked up, then beat and tortured, would not have minded seeing him dead; he lived, only to be killed by American troops along with his brother, Qusay. (In that firefight, Bashir says, the bravest fighter was Qusay’s 13-year-old son, Mustafa.) Bashir, an artist frequently honored by Hussein (and responsible for turning an odd snake-slaying dream of his into a widely reproduced painting), was also a gifted reconstructive surgeon who treated thousands in the course of the bloody, futile Iran-Iraq War; afterward, he wound up doing untold nose jobs, for, he writes, “It is well known that few Arab women are happy with their noses.” Surely many women in the Hussein circle were not, and even at the outbreak of the latest war, some were coming to him for buttock reductions, breast resizings and, yes, nose jobs. The sightings of Saddam himself in Bashir’s pages are only occasional, but they are revealing: They show at turns a pragmatist, though one whose inner circle could not convince him to abandon his hatred of Israel and come to terms with Britain and the U.S. before it was too late, and at other turns a romantic, given to writing gushy genre novels in which someone very like him turns out to be the hero.
Bashir clearly tries to distance himself from the mess. No dice, but these up-close notes are useful in understanding the Hussein regime.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-349-11935-X
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Abacus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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