The Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gerturde Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawerence of Arabia Janet Wallach 2005 |
A sweeping, fascinating tale of a woman ahead of her time. This will written, well researched biography was hard to put down. Gertrude Bell herself, a contemporary of Lawrence of Arabia, was a complex, brilliant woman whose life was peppered with many tragedies as well as adventures. Diminutive in size, she scaled mountains, camped in the desert and broke bread with tribal chiefs. She felt more at ease in the Middle East than her own homeland of England, where Victorian women were ruled by social confines. Perhaps it was because of her sex that Arabians allowed her more carte blanche. In a country land which shuts its women off like trophies, Bell was often treated more like a priestess. She had the audacity to be ultimately feminine and intelligent at the same time, which gave her a special status on foreign soil. Professionally, Bell triumphed, and was accepted as an authority on the Middle East. Her love life, however, as well as relationships with her own family, fell short. Reviewed by Moel |
Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life Queen Noor 2003 |
"Leap of Faith" can be deceiving. At first you think: cool upper middle class blonde marries much older(and shorter) King. Ah, a late 20th century Grace Kelly? An American Princess Diana? Far from it. Queen Noor, who began her life as Lisa Halaby, is and always has been a serious, thoughtful woman who chooses to live her life for politics, philosophy, her family (both her one of origin and by marriage), and causes. This book traces her beginnnings in the upper middle and upper classes of American society. Her father, Najeeb Halaby, was a very successful Arab American who at various times . ran the FAA and Pan Am. Her mother was of Swedish American descent. While Lisa/Noor appears to have inherited the looks of her Nordic ancestors, she clearly embraced her Arab American heritage far more enthusiastically as a child. Lisa, as she was then known, grew up in affluent sections of LA, Washington, DC, and New York. She was educated at the finest schools-westlake, nationalcathedral school, chapin and concord academy-and was a strong student and outstanding athlete (captain of the field hockey team). She took her studies and the politics of the 1960's very seriously and insisted on transferring from the apolitical Chapin to the more academically challenging Concord Academy. Eventually she lands at Princeton, in the first female class. After she receives a degree in urban planning, she moves from one international job to another and finally lands at an architecture firm
in Jordan. And the rest, as they say, is history. Noor details her leap-from all American (albeit one of the upper classes) Wasp girl to Muslim wife to royalty-in a clear, elegant, understated way. She clearly believes that she found her soul mate not only with her husband, King Hussein, but with the country of Jordan and its people. Reviewed by Crazyforgems |
Not Without My Daughter Betty Mahmoody 1987 |
In this fascinating book, Betty Mahmoody relates the story of her life as the wife of an Iranian man who was a doctor in the U.S. when she met him. Although by moods of depression, Moody is a loving husband and father most of the time. When his nephew comes to visit, they begin to plan for Moody's family to come to Iran for a two-week vacation. Betty suspects that Moody may try to detain them in his native land, but she relents when he promises on the Koran that this will not be the case. They go to Iran, where Betty finds Moody's relatives to be rude and arrogant, as well as having filthy houses and bodies. She cannot wait for the 2 weeks to be over, but when the time comes to return to the States, Betty's worst nightmare comes true when Moody detains them. While he is in Iran, Moody's word is law and no one can interfere with his decision to keep his family there. What follows is a nightmare of beatings,
harrassment, and virtual imprisonment, as Moody returns to his traditional Islamic ways. This is an incredibly eye-opening book, and the courage of Betty and her daughter during their ordeal is inspiring Reviewed by Karen Potts. |
Reading Lolita in Tehran Azar Nafisi 2003 |
The author, now living in the US, tells of almost two decades in Iran, as a teacher of English and American literature. She tells of the great hopes for reform after the fall of the Shah and the return from exile of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and with her we watch in horror as the revolution takes Iran by force instead into its medieval past. There are arrests, murders, and executions and those who can, flee to the West. The transformation of Iran is charted by the repressive attempts to make women invisible, by covering them in public from head to toe. It becomes a world in which wearing fingernail polish, even under gloves, is a punishable offense. And punishment, as we learn, is typically brutal.The author escapes from this violence into the imaginative world of Westernnovels (from Nabokov to Dashiell Hammet) where she finds democratic ideals expressed in fiction's ability to help us empathize with other people. For her,it is the heart that has gone out of the gun-wielding moral police that want to sweep away all but complete submission to their fundamentalist form of Islam. And while she is a teacher, she must deal with classes filled with students who have been polarized by the political forces around them. All, curiously, are in single agreement that the West is corrupt and absolutely evil. Meanwhile, the novels of Western writers engage them, sometimes furiously. A wonderful sequence in the book concerns a mock trial in the classroom in which "The Great Gatsby" is brought up on charges of immorality."Lolita," we discover, becomes a story of a girl who finally escapes from the clutche sof a man who wants to erase who she is and turn her into a figment of his imagination. It's not an allegory of Iran, Nafisi insists, but it's hard not to see the parallels. The contamination of personal relationships between men and women and its impact on love and marriage inform their readings of James and Austen. Meanwhile, even as her classes meet to argue the merits of these authors, their books are disappearing as one bookstore after another is closed down.Added to all this is an account of living through eight years of war with Iraq, while missiles fall on Tehran and the numbers of casualties on the front lines mount. After leaving teaching, the author assembles a hand-picked group of former students, all female, to meet weekly at her home and talk more about books. Here the individual personalities and histories of each come to the fore, and we get a glimpse (as in fiction) into personal worlds experienced under circumstances that have nearly robbed them of their identities. Reviewed by Ronald Scheer |
Kabul Beauty School Deborah Rodriquez 2007 |
A work of non-fiction Deborah Rodriguez's book could almost be fictional. Only that it isn't. It's a story about determination, challenge, love and heartache. It is the story of an American woman who catapulted herself from Holland, Michigan to Kabul, Afghanistan. A maverick by nature, Rodriguez came to Afghanistan in 2002, with an American non-governmental organization (NGO) trained in emergencies. Also gregarious by nature, Rodriguez very early on turned her attention to befriending Afghans who spoke some English. Her checkered background in multitasking and a rich personal life helped her in being sought after what was badly need in Kabul - hairdressing. With this, she developed a deep bond with Afghan women, who were just coming out of the tyranny of living under the Taliban. Their heart rending stories are told poignantly by Rodriguez, throughout the book. Reviewed Anita Anand |
The Dressmaker of Khair Khana Gayle Lemmon 2011 |
Incredible debut novel. Ms. Lemmon writes to shed a light on the seemingly insurmountable challenges faced by Kamila during the Taliban years in Afghanistan. As the author writes, "This was a chance to even the ledger, to share one small story that made the difference between starvation and survival for the families whose lives it changed. I wanted to pull the curtain back for readers on a place foreigners know more for its rocket attacks and roadside bombs than its countless quiet fears of courage."
Kamila was one of 8 children (6 girls and 2 boys). Her parents belief was that all of their children deserved and should be educated. Kamila, their second daughter, had just finished school and wanted to become a teacher when the Taliban took over Kabul. She was forced to stay indoors and was witness to brutality faced by women who dared to venture unescorted by a male relative or expose any skin in public. What they hoped would be a short lived regime, quickly became obvious that the Taliban would rule for much longer than they had hoped. Kamila's father was retired from the Afghan Army and was at significant personal risk as he was considered a threat to the Taliban. Her older brother was of the age where he could be drafted into the Taliban to fight. It was unsafe for a family with so many women/girls to travel. So, Kamila's parents left to seek safety in a Northern Afghan town and her brother fled to Iran in hopes to work and send money home to the women/girls and one remaining 13 year old brother in Khair Khan. Kamila got the idea to begin a dressmaking business upon visiting a female doctor. All medical services were segregated by male/female and medicine was one of the few occupations that women were allowed to continue to pursue. Kamila took significant risks in running a business out of her home and going with her brother on a daily basis to sell their wares in the market. The quality of their work brought in many orders and the sisters were working nearly round the clock. In order to fulfill demand as well as to help other families who were primarily destitute women, Kamila started a dressmaker school all secretly. This story of survival shows both a woman's love of her family, sense of purpose, and determination to make the most out of life despite horrendous circumstances. It is an incredibly inspiring story that the reader will not forget. Reviewed by Mom to 2 Boys "Working Professional" |
Infidel Ayaan Hirsi Ali 2007 |
Autobiographies often suffer from late-life authorship--a time when the fires are damped and the events foreshortened by time. This one--by a woman still in her thirties--is an exception to nearly every rule of the genre. Not least for its electrifying readability: it consumed every free moment of the two days it took to finish it. Putting it down was simply not an option. This book will grab your imagination like no other, transplant you into a world you have probably never known, and introduce you to the intimate world of a muslim family swept by circumstance all over Africa, Arabia, and Europe. The complex interaction of tribes, clans, cultures, extended families and nations (and their consequences) isn't dryly analyzed, it is woven into a personal drama with the momentum of a locomotive. The love of family rides perilously over the jarring railbed of refugee life, of ancient and modern Islamic conflicts, all of it recounted with real compassion in beautifully clear English. This multilingual immigrant needs no ghostwriter. Unlike the collection of editorial essays which comprised "The Caged Virgin", "Infidel" is a consistently focused narrative of a spectacularly eventful life launched almost inadvertantly into an unparalleled adventure in moral courage. But there's far more here than a clash-of-cultures story well told. There is no targeted rush toward a predestined liberation. The revelatory discovery of western freedoms comes late in the book and gathers like a slow-motion sunrise. Only in the final chapters does she defect from Muslim culture, graduate from the University of Leiden, become a Dutch legislator, a target of Islamic terrorists, and an incendiary revolutionary for Muslim womens' rights. More than simply discovering western libertarian values, she shows a deep and critical understanding of their history, how they've shaped the modern world, and shows their prognosis for dealing with the festering problem of Europe's Islamic subculture. Her extraordinary life seems more an ongoing work in progress than a settled iconographic career. She has recently moved to America--the adopted home of another famously eloquent and consequential revolutionary: Tom Paine. Reviewed by Steve Summers |
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This is the story of a young French journalist who turned the tables on an ISIS jihadist who thought he was recruiting a young girl to be his wife/slave. Anna Erelle was a journalist doing articles about European girls who had left to join the Islamic radicals in Syria. In order to get close to her subjects, she created an online identity as a young convert to Islam. Much to her surprise she was contacted by a fighter dressed in designer clothes who wanted to make her his bride. When he wanted to skype, she was able to disguise both her identity and her age by donning full Muslim garb. The seduction of the supposed sixteen year old was a stark contrast of flattery and love talk punctuated by rage and demands for complete submission. The most interesting part of the story was how the writer exercised control over the jihadi by not giving in to his demands which only made him more desperate to possess her. Shortly after she broke off contact, French security forces, who had been monitoring the communications, apparently killed the Islamic commander. She got a great story but had to go into hiding for fear of retribution. The book is a brief window into the mindset of an ISIS jihadi. It also helps to explain how vulnerable girls are tricked into leaving their homes and families to enter a life of submission and possible death. Reviewed by S Sather |
In the Skin of a Jihadist
Anna Erelle
2015
Anna Erelle
2015
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This well written book provides a diplomatic illustration of how two women, one Jewish and the other Palestinian, beat the odds of developing hatred for the so-called, "enemy," through empathy and genuine love for the other. An Improbable Friendship, successfully narrates the the story of how Ruth Dayan's and Raymonda Tawil's friendship, in its true nature, is an act of truth and reconciliation.
I highly recommend this read as I feel that the author successfully threaded an unbiased review of history with personal interviews in order to tell a story of love and resilience. It suggests to the reader that peace is possible if each side empathizes with the other Reviewed by Rachle Lev |
An Improbably Friendship
Anthony David
2015
Anthony David
2015
The Taliban Shuffle
Kim Barker 2010 |
This girl had no clue. She was a mess. She was disorganized, in a crappy relationship, did not know what was going on around her, was ignorant and arrogant. Then she flew to Afghanistan, acted even more clueless, insulting and arrogant. Then, she developed some interest in the country, and later downright fell in love with it. And that changed her. The arrogance disappeared, and was replaced by respect for other people, other cultures. She became a war junkie during that time, did some seriously stupid things, but she matured, became a real grown up. She ended this chapter of her life with having a clue. That is the story Kim Barker tells in this book. The story of personal growth, interwoven with her adventures as a foreign correspondent for a Chicago newspaper. The stories she has to tell do not reveal any big surprises about Afghanistan, the war there, the Taliban or the US handling of all that mess. There are other books out there, which already dealt with those aspects. What makes this book stand out amongst them is the unique perspective of a somewhat naive American girl, who was thrown into this alien world with no preparation at all. She eventually learns to get a grip on this strange world, and on herself. She learns, matures, and lets the reader take part in this process. Some adventures she describes are downright hilarious, others are very sad, some are a bit strange, but all are interesting. Her writing style is not the most polished one can imagine, but it gets the message across. She is a no frills person, sometimes harsh, sometimes brash, and that is beautifully reflected in her writing style. The book is very entertaining, especially for someone like me, who has read about half a doyen books about the current Afghanistan war, most of them are more serious historical and political scholarly works. This book tells the tale from a refreshingly different, very personal perspective. Reviewed by A Tegmeiter |
The Wind in My Hair
Masih Alinejad 2018 |
This book was beautiful, wrenching, and eye-opening, and if there is any one thing that hit home the hardest for me, it's how little I knew about Iran. I still know little, but this book gave profoundly intimate look into a country, world, and culture that was exotic and dark, but also haunting. This was Masih's story, but much of it read like a thriller. I couldn't put it down! It was just incredible—disturbing, and profoundly tense and gripping. One of my favorite passages was this one:
"Minutes went by and I walked around the cell some more. Still no one appeared. Gradually, a sense of unease crept in. It was very quiet. Not a sound could be heard. nothing—no muffled voices, no hum of machinery, no sound of doors being slammed. When I distinctly remember is the silence that descended... I desperately wanted to hear another sound so that I knew I was not alone. the silence was eerie. It was so powerful that I didn't want to make a sound, either." Honestly, much of the book was that tense, and that gripping. And if it wasn't those things, it was infuriating and heartbreaking. This story is for everyone, but as a woman, I found it to be more personal. It made me grateful for what I have, and reminded me to never take it for granted. It also reminded me why we keep fighting... To honor the harder battles fought and won by the women who came before, who fight now, and who will continue the fight long after we are gone. reviewed by Gingerbread |
Passionate Nomad Jane Geniesse 2001 |
Spending time with interesting women who are inaccessible to us in real life is one of the pleasures of a good book and Jane Fletcher Geniesse has just added to the list. The author gives us a detailed account of the life of a fearless wanderer, Freya Stark, whose 100 years on earth (1893-1993)were packed with adventures to rival the tales of the Arabian Nights. Freya, though hardly living up to the attributes of her Norse namesake (no goddess of love and beauty, she!), nevertheless conquered the Arab world by making full use of her strengths: drive, intelligence, and an extraordinary empathy for the peoples of the Middle East. Geniesse does not dismiss her shortcomings but offers good reasons for the bizarre behavior of her heroine. She also handles the historical background with grace and understanding. It was an extraordinary time, made even more so by an indomitable English woman, and the author is to be congratulated for presenting her with such skill.
reviewed by George Adams |
Life Undercover
Amaryllis Fox 2019 |
This is the absolutely riveting story of a modern day spy, a real life James Bond, although, as she notes, Bond is ridiculous; in the real world of espionage, "one street chase and my cover is blown for life." This is the story of how Ms. Fox became a spy, what that life cost her and what it gained, and why she left.
This memoir exposes so many secret lives, all at once. Ms Fox talks about being recruited by the CIA while still in graduate school, getting up at 2 am, analyzing and preparing nuclear threat assessments for the President's morning briefings before biking back across DC for a full day of classes. She writes about being chosen for clandestine service, and how she recruited her first pretend asset, with a nod to Frank Sinatra and asking for a favor. She writes about how, in the most high stakes meeting imaginable, with a terrorist cell ready to unleash a nuclear bomb, the presence of clove oil in her backpack ended up being the prop that turned the tide. Reviewed by Robyn C |