An unflattering portrait, perhaps exacerbated by an infelicitous translation.
The memoir of Kamila, a Lebanese Muslim woman whose novelist daughter (Only in London, 2001, etc.) takes on the voice of her mother to tell her story.
Al-Shakyh begins in 1932, when her unschooled mother was also seven, living in poverty in a village outside Beirut. After she moved to Beirut to live with extended family, Kamila, whose views of life were shaped by romantic movies, fell in love with 17-year-old Muhammad. Forced at age 14 to marry her widowed, much older brother-in-law, she had her first child at 15 and her second (the author) three years later. Older family members took care of her children while the pretty, cunning Kamila stole money from her husband, mocked him at prayer and carried on an affair with Muhammad. Eventually she divorced, leaving her children behind, and married her lover. Marriage to Muhammad, however, was far from romantic, and she was soon overwhelmed by the responsibilities of running a household and exhausted by multiple pregnancies. Muhammad’s accidental death left her a widow at age 34 with five children to support. Especially vulnerable because she was a woman who could neither read nor write, Kamila somehow kept her family together, though the details are vague. She evaded or conned creditors and surrounded herself with women who gave each other moral support. The author tells less about the later years of her mother’s life, part of which she spent with family in Kuwait and later San Diego, where she appears as an unhappy, isolated woman and an interfering mother-in-law. The author returns to her own voice to end her mother’s story in Beirut, where Kamila died in 2001. The picture that emerges of a devious woman struggling to make her way in a rigid, male-dominated society is clear, but the prose is often trite and the chronology murky. A dramatis personae and occasional footnotes aid readers unfamiliar with Lebanese history or Muslim culture.
An unflattering portrait, perhaps exacerbated by an infelicitous translation.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-37820-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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