An eloquent, provocative, and timely memoir.
A noted Palestinian journalist links her story as a woman born to subvert social norms to the story of her rebellious birthplace, Gaza.
Born in the Rafah refugee camp in 1982, al-Ghoul’s “strong-minded” ways manifested by age 5, when she yelled at a taxi driver for driving off with a favorite hat. The author's outspokenness eventually made her, in the eyes of both men and women, an inappropriate match for the young men she loved. Because she was under near-constant surveillance by the Muslim community and a family that, on her father's side, had close ties to Hamas, Gaza became a place of contradiction for her. While it surrounded the author in warmth, it also made her “suffer.” In 1990, she and her family moved to the Emirates, where, immersed in a Pan-Arabic culture, al-Ghoul witnessed how people spread an oppressive, “obscurantist model” of Islam that eventually made it back to individual Arab countries. She also watched as Yasser Arafat pledged allegiance to Saddam Hussein, which provoked outrage among Emirati authorities toward Palestinians. When al-Ghoul was 16, the family returned to Gaza. Told to cover herself and limit her interactions with boys, she became rebellious. Her father threatened to cut off fees if she attended a secular university; unwilling to bend to his wishes, she took a job to support herself and began to write. As a journalist who critiqued not only Israeli occupiers, but also Hamas—including the uncle she held responsible for killing members of the rival Fatah party, which she also opposed—the author quickly earned the reputation as a “corrupt [and] indecent woman” and became the target of death threats. That her personal life included marriages to and divorces from two Arab intellectuals only added fuel to the controversy surrounding her. Fierce and defiant, al-Ghoul’s book is as much a celebration of Gazan resilience in the face of raging internal and external conflicts as it is of one woman’s life-affirming strength of will.
An eloquent, provocative, and timely memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9987770-5-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
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