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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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