A sobering exposé of Saudi Arabian culture and a tribute to the courage and strength of both the author and her husband.
In a slim volume originally published in Germany last year, the wife of imprisoned human rights activist Raif Badawi keeps her husband’s plight in the public eye.
Aided by Middle East reporter Hoffmann, Haidar reveals not only the harsh treatment of her husband, sentenced to 10 years in a Saudi Arabian prison and 1,000 lashes for the crime of apostasy, but also the severe limitations on the lives of women in Saudi Arabia. A traditionally raised Saudi woman, the author begins her story before their marriage, making vividly clear the segregation of life by gender: the only men she had spoken to were her father and her seven brothers. A cellphone, given to her by a married sister, launched the romance of Haidar and Badawi, and despite fierce family opposition, they married in 2002. Wahabbi Muslims, she writes, constitute a kind of state within a state in Saudi Arabia, controlling religious life, education, and, to some extent, justice. When Badawi started a website related to free speech, the religious police swung into action. He was arrested, and the site was shut down. Having sought and found political asylum, Haidar now lives with their three children in Sherbrooke, Quebec, where she continues to wage an apparently global campaign to win her husband’s freedom. In somewhat stilted prose, she blends the story of their adjustment to life in a cold climate, her estrangement from her Saudi family, her conflict over how much to tell her children, and her efforts, aided by Amnesty International, to win her husband’s release. Although Badawi, a recipient of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, remains in prison, Haidar’s book ends on an optimistic note, her spirits buoyed by the international support her efforts have garnered.
A sobering exposé of Saudi Arabian culture and a tribute to the courage and strength of both the author and her husband.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59051-801-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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