Timely—and most depressing.
Well-done but dispiriting memoir of growing up in Iraq during the 1960s and ’70s, when Kurdish aspirations for independence were increasingly suppressed.
Now a filmmaker living in Paris, Saleem memorably depicts the close family ties and the comfort of Kurdish culture. His story also grimly reminds us of the Kurds’ long-time persecution by Turks, Iranians, and, most recently, Saddam Hussein. Perhaps understandably, considering how badly they have been treated, the Kurds too have contemplated violent solutions to their problem. Saleem’s father, who kept a rifle on hand, supported General Barzani, a Kurdish military leader who led a group of armed guerrillas into the mountains in hopes of establishing an independent state. His older brother, 18-year-old Dilovan, joined them, and later, when the Baathist party took over Iraq and bombed their village, adolescent Saleem also wanted to work for the cause of independence. At one point the family fled to the mountains to fight with Kurdish troops, but the resistance was forcibly quashed. After a dreary spell in a refugee camp, they decided to return to their native village of Aqra. Under Saddam’s leadership in the late 1970s, Iraqis increased their efforts to eliminate the Kurds. In measured prose, Saleem recalls soldiers arriving in their village and setting up barracks, where they were rumored to torture Kurds. Baathist teachers took over the schools, and Iraqi doctors would not help his sick niece, who eventually died. His education was cut short: instruction at school was only in Arabic, a language he did not know, and opportunities for further study were denied to Kurds. Saleem knew there was no way he could go to film school. Increasingly he began to accept that exile might be his only option, though even that would not be easy, since Kurds were denied passports.
Timely—and most depressing.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-21693-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
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
SEEN & HEARD
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