Ibrahim’s bold firsthand account is powerful testimony to resilience and survival in the face of a kind of warfare that is...
A memoir of abduction and sexual slavery at the hands of the Islamist Boko Haram militant group.
Ibrahim grew up in northern Nigeria, where Christians and Muslims have long lived in a sometimes-uneasy truce for generations. Her household, like most, was poor; her father made and sold fly swatters, and if sales were bad “he would guiltily ask my mother to beg for alms outside the churches in the surrounding villages so that we wouldn’t starve.” Things got a little better when Ibrahim married, but then her husband was cut down in a Boko Haram killing, as were other Christians, even as young Christian girls were spirited off to the forest and pressed into servitude. Writing with political journalist Hoffmann (co-author: The Girl Who Escaped ISIS, 2016, etc.), Ibrahim offers a cleareyed view of the sociology underlying this sexual slavery: in a place where unemployment is rampant and jobs few, young men lack the wherewithal to support a household, and for them, “the prospect of a bride as the spoils of war is highly enticing.” Never mind that the bride may already be married. Ibrahim, twice married, was pregnant when Boko Haram fighters stole her from her village, a fact that she had to disguise from them and that complicated her eventual homecoming, since children born of kidnappings “often disappear without a trace,” the feeling being that Boko Haram genes must be exterminated. The narrative takes unexpected turns at several points, including humane behavior on the part of the confused young fighter to whom she was pledged and who told her, “if you don’t marry me, then marry someone else. No woman who refuses will be left alive.”
Ibrahim’s bold firsthand account is powerful testimony to resilience and survival in the face of a kind of warfare that is becoming ever more common, its terror visited mostly on women.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-849-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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