Review by New York Times Review
A HIGHER LOYALTY: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, by James Comey. (Flatiron, $29.99.) In this impassioned memoir, the former F.B.I. director calls the Trump presidency a "forest fire" that is seriously harming the country. The central themes Comey returns to are the toxic consequences of lying and the corrosive effects of choosing loyalty to an individual over the rule of law. GOD SAVE TEXAS: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State, by Lawrence Wright. (Knopf, $27.95.) This longtime resident of Texas examines the complexities, contradictions and sheer goofiness of his state, arguing that it heralds America's future. THE SPACE BARONS: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos, by Christian Davenport. (Public Affairs, $28.) The new space race involves a number of competitive and highly ambitious entrepreneurs who want to make their mark by taking us into orbit. Davenport's narrative, filled with colorful reporting and sharp insights, explores this new frontier. SHARP: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, by Michelle Dean. (Grove, $26.) Dean, a journalist and critic, considers 10 influential women writers, including Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Nora Ephron and Pauline Kael, teasing out their affinities: a taste for battle and intellectual honesty. AWAYLAND, by Ramona Ausubel. (Riverhead, $26.) A melting mother, a Cyclops with a dating profile and other fanciful characters inhabit Ausubel's latest collection of stories, many of which revolve around family life, here depicted as both life-giving and treacherous. WRESTLING WITH THE DEVIL: A Prison Memoir, by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. (The New Press, $25.99.) Ngugi spent nearly a year in prison in 1978 for writing a play in his native language that threatened the Kenyan government. This is the story of how he maintained his creative energies even while suffering the indignities of his detention. THE BEEKEEPER: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq, by Dunya Mikhail. (New Directions, paper, $16.95.) In 2014, ISIS abducted thousands of ethnic Yazidi women and children in Iraq. Mikhail, a poet and journalist, profiles the beekeeper who helped rescue some, delivering a searing portrait of courage. CENSUS, by Jesse Ball. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) As he explains in the preface, Ball wrote this quietly dazzling father-son road-trip novel - a tribute to his brother, Abram - because he wanted to capture "what it is like to know and love a Down syndrome boy or girl." THE FUNERAL, written and illustrated by Matt James. (Groundwood, $18.95; ages 4 to 8.) This picture book takes a refreshing, child'seye view of the funeral of an older relative. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 6, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Award-winning poet Mikhail, an Iraqi exile who fled her homeland in 1996 and eventually settled in Michigan, makes her nonfiction debut with a hybrid text that combines reportage and personal memoir with the intention of giving voice to northern Iraqi women victims of Daesh (known in the U.S. as ISIS). The survivors' stories are relentlessly horrific; words seem inadequate in describing the systematic slaughter, capture, sale, rape, and torture of human beings by other human beings. Mikhail is privy to these grisly narratives through the eponymous Beekeeper, Abdullah Shrem, an Iraqi man whose response to his personal tragedy of losing family was to create an extensive network through Iraq, Syria, and Turkey to rescue stolen women and their young children. Abdullah's frequent calls connect Mikhail to survivors, until she herself travels to Iraq for a first visit in two decades to witness Abdullah's miracles. Despite the inarguable significance of these survivors' stories, as literature, The Beekeeper ultimately disappoints. Mikhail's diary-like presentation, complete with phone interruptions, personal dreams recalled, and ruminations on the universe, feels inappropriately trivial amid the gruesome accounts of hideous inhumanity.--Hong, Terry Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Iraqi journalist and poet Mikhail (The Iraqi Nights) lays bare the agonizing experiences of the Yazidi people at the hands of ISIS in this visceral account of the outskirts of modern day Iraq. In 2014, ISIS began invading villages of northern Iraq, killing most of the men and enslaving the women and children. Much of Mikhail's account is made up of first-person testimonies of several survivors who speak of being repeatedly raped, sold to the highest bidder, and tortured. They recall losing their families and witnessing their children, raised by ISIS supporters, becoming "a distorted version" of who they once were. Mikhail also homes in on the rescue efforts of a man named Abdullah, a local beekeeper who used his knowledge of the region and the money he made selling honey in Iraq and Syria to cultivate a "hive of transporters and smugglers" to save women; he subsequently connected Mikhail to several survivors. Powerful and heartbreaking, this work lets the survivors tell their stories and highlights the courage of those risking their lives to rescue others. Photos. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Mikhail, a native of Iraq, returns to her home country from New York to tell the harrowing stories of Yazidi women living under the control of Daesh, known to Westerners as ISIS. A painful, wrenching read, these chronicles expose tremendous horrors of brutal rape, kidnapping, sex slavery, and incomprehensible domination as these women desperately search for some semblance of peace and escape-mental, physical, and emotional. Mikhail's poetic background lends a unique voice to these women in a narrative style that can be difficult to grasp and follow at times. VERDICT These women need to be heard, making this an important, commendable work. However, the atypical narrative format, which switches gears often and includes granular retellings of phone conversations, subjectively affects the reading experience.-Erin Entrada Kelly, Philadelphia © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An Iraqi journalist and poet long resident in New York returns to her native country to chronicle the misfortunes of Yazidi women under the rule of the Islamic State group.The country of the Yazidi lies outside Mosul in northern Iraq. Under the control of IS, also called Daesh, it saw the rise of two kinds of smugglers: of cigarettes and of captive women. Using tobacco was strictly forbidden under IS, to great penalty, but kidnapping women was a luxury, a prize of war, that was met by Yazidis and sympathetic Arabs smuggling them back to their families, sometimes impregnated by their captors. The beekeeper of Mikhail's (The Theory of Absence, 2014, etc.) title likens the stolen women to queen bees, the work of rescuing the sabaya, or sex slaves, to apiculture: "We worked like in a beehive," he says, "with extreme care and well-planned initiatives." The women are psychologically damaged and do not always reintegrate easily into Yazidi society. Their accounts are harrowing; one tells the author of being raped by a Daesh fighter who sang, "Oh, Muslim, come, there's a virgin in heaven" before assaulting her each night, promising her that in the afterlife she would remain a sex slave to serve the faithful, who "would kill themselves to meet their houris in heaven." Mikhail bears witness to them and other women in war-torn Iraq, women who have scarcely known peace throughout their lives. That she is a poet is clear on each page, as when she writes, "maybe Kurdistan is a daffodil that has only wilted temporarily, only temporarily." She writes affectingly and well, but newsworthy as it is, her account follows two major booksCathy Otten's With Ash on Their Faces and Nadia Murad's The Last Girlon the same subject and may be lost in the shuffle. That would be a shame, for it is a meritorious, urgent book that deserves an audience.All but true believers suffer under Daesh, Mikhail makes abundantly clearbut especially women. A powerful study. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
