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TEARS OF THE DESERT

A MEMOIR OF SURVIVAL IN DARFUR

Both heartrending and chilling.

Eyewitness account of the systematic genocide inflicted on the black African tribes of Darfur province by Sudan’s Arab government.

Assisted by British broadcast journalist Lewis (co-author: Slave: My True Story, 2004), Bashir begins with her mostly happy childhood in a small village in the western desert. She does not whitewash the past, however: As a young girl she resisted the ritual facial scarification that was customary in her Zaghawa tribe, but could not escape genital mutilation (described in horrific detail). She was the daughter of a cattle herder prosperous enough to send her away to secondary school and to medical school in Khartoum, where she endured (and defied) Arab scorn and mistreatment. While the initial chapters charm with their fascinating portrait of tribal desert life, those that follow are grim. When government officials learned of the young doctor’s determination to treat the wounded from both sides of the conflict destroying Darfur, Bashir was at first threatened and then detained and gang-raped. Following the burning of her village and the rape and slaughter of its inhabitants, she fled south and after some months was able, with the help of a paid agent, to board a plane leaving Sudan. The memoir’s final portion recounts her life in England, where she entered a marriage arranged long-distance by her father. Bashir and her husband (a cousin from her village) repeatedly attempted to gain asylum as refugees, but they were nearly deported; thanks to publicity drummed up by the Aegis Trust, an NGO active in efforts to end the Darfur crisis, they were able to remain in England. Bashir still has no knowledge of the fate or whereabouts of her family in Sudan. An epilogue provides statistics about the extent of the killing and devastation in Darfur, the failed attempts of the international community to halt it and the enabling role of China, a major importer of Sudanese oil and principal supplier of its arms.

Both heartrending and chilling.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-345-50625-2

Page Count: 336

Publisher: One World/Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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