An eloquent, provocative, and timely memoir.
A noted Palestinian journalist links her story as a woman born to subvert social norms to the story of her rebellious birthplace, Gaza.
Born in the Rafah refugee camp in 1982, al-Ghoul’s “strong-minded” ways manifested by age 5, when she yelled at a taxi driver for driving off with a favorite hat. The author's outspokenness eventually made her, in the eyes of both men and women, an inappropriate match for the young men she loved. Because she was under near-constant surveillance by the Muslim community and a family that, on her father's side, had close ties to Hamas, Gaza became a place of contradiction for her. While it surrounded the author in warmth, it also made her “suffer.” In 1990, she and her family moved to the Emirates, where, immersed in a Pan-Arabic culture, al-Ghoul witnessed how people spread an oppressive, “obscurantist model” of Islam that eventually made it back to individual Arab countries. She also watched as Yasser Arafat pledged allegiance to Saddam Hussein, which provoked outrage among Emirati authorities toward Palestinians. When al-Ghoul was 16, the family returned to Gaza. Told to cover herself and limit her interactions with boys, she became rebellious. Her father threatened to cut off fees if she attended a secular university; unwilling to bend to his wishes, she took a job to support herself and began to write. As a journalist who critiqued not only Israeli occupiers, but also Hamas—including the uncle she held responsible for killing members of the rival Fatah party, which she also opposed—the author quickly earned the reputation as a “corrupt [and] indecent woman” and became the target of death threats. That her personal life included marriages to and divorces from two Arab intellectuals only added fuel to the controversy surrounding her. Fierce and defiant, al-Ghoul’s book is as much a celebration of Gazan resilience in the face of raging internal and external conflicts as it is of one woman’s life-affirming strength of will.
An eloquent, provocative, and timely memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9987770-5-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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 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
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