Review by New York Times Review
DANCING BEARS: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny, by Witold Szablowski. (Penguin, paper, $16.) This utterly original book by a Polish journalist describes how Bulgarians earned money by making captive bears dance, then shifts to a farreaching conversation about the meaning of freedom. BENEATH A RUTHLESS SUN: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found, by Gilbert King. (Riverhead, $28.) In his latest book, King returns to the corrupt Jim Crow-era Florida sheriff he wrote about in his 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner, "Devil in the Grove." Here, the victims of his brutality include a mentally disabled white teenager, falsely accused of rape. THE PARKING LOT ATTENDANT, by Nafkote Tamirat. (Holt, $26.) An Ethiopian-American teenager living in a mysterious island commune narrates this impressive debut novel, recalling her childhood in Boston and her entanglement there with a charismatic parking-lot attendant and his possibly sinister schemes. VARINA, by Charles Frazier. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Returning to the Southern landscapes of his best-selling novel, "Cold Mountain," Frazier uses his new novel to revive one of the almost forgotten figures of 19th-century American history, the much younger and much conflicted wife of Jefferson Davis. THE SPARSHOLT AFFAIR, by Alan Hollinghurst. (Knopf, $28.95.) For a man in the 1950s, gay sex was a scandal that led to a prison term. His son comes to maturity in a different era, one in which he can take a legal husband. Hollinghurst's novel traces the private and public twists of this process. SOMETHING WONDERFUL: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution, by Todd S. Purdum. (Holt, $32.) Not long ago, these progenitors of virtually all modern musical theater were widely considered dull, stodgy middlebrows. A political writer by trade, Purdum demonstrates, through a dual portrait of the brilliant songwriters, just how wrongheaded that was. TWO SISTERS: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey Into the Syrian Jihad, by Asne Seierstad. Translated by Sean Kinsella. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) This absorbing account reconstructs the saga of Muslim sisters who fled their home in Norway to join ISIS, and of the distraught father who went after them. THE WOMAN'S HOUR: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, by Elaine Weiss. (Viking, $28.) After Congress passed the 19 th Amendment in 1919, ratification was required in 36 states, and all eyes were on Tennessee. Weiss's view of the proceedings is panoramic and juicy. UNCLE SHAWN AND BILL AND THE ALMOST ENTIRELY UNPLANNED ADVENTURE, by A. L. Kennedy. (Kane Miller, paper, $5.99; ages 7 to 10.) In this delightfully cracked first children's book from a well-regarded novelist, a man helps a badger flee danger. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 20, 2018]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Seierstad (One of Us) tells a harrowing tale that began in October 2013, when two teenage Norwegian-Somali girls, Ayan and Leila, fled their comfortable life in Norway for the Islamic State in Syria. Their bewildered father, Sadiq Juma, set off to retrieve them, thwarted first by his imprisonment by ISIS and later by a botched kidnapping attempt that resulted only in extracting a stranger. Along the way, Seierstad reveals not only the destruction that competing armies have leveled in Syria, but also the chilling process of the sisters' radicalization, tracing their exposure to the fundamentalist group Islam Net. Seierstad also accords her large cast of characters the dignity of being treated in depth, detailing the sisters' lives back in Norway, as well as those of their friends, also from Somali backgrounds, who followed very different paths, and revealing Sadiq's flaws along with his courage. The book is more gripping narrative than cultural study, especially in the dramatic scenes of Sadiq's imprisonment. Seierstad's scrupulous reporting shines a revealing new light on the phenomenon of young Westerners becoming fervent supporters of terror. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
On October 17, 2013, the unthinkable happened to Sadiq and Sara, Somali immigrants raising a family in Norway. Their two teenage daughters, Ayan and Leila, disappeared, leaving an email stating their intentions to travel to Syria to aid in jihad. To find out why they would reject family, friendships, and country to face violence, death, and oppression as members of a terror organization, Seierstad (One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway-and Its Aftermath) reconstructed the events leading up to the sisters' decision and the family's attempts to bring them home by piecing together interviews, emails, instant messages, and text messages. Through technology, the family tried desperately to keep the girls tethered to their former life, even after they married Islamic State fighters, so they wouldn't vanish entirely. On the news we hear about radicalized youth and fear that it will lead to new terrorist attacks-this book takes that to a more personal level with the unresolvable pain and grief it can cause a family. VERDICT An important story that will leave readers considering the effects of xenophobia, youth culture, social media, and radicalization. [See Prepub Alert, 8/28/17.]-Heidi Uphoff, Sandia National Laboratories, NM © 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
In which the sins of the children are visited upon the fathers: an unblinking journalistic account of the life of the jihadi."You did not suddenly wake up one day a fanatic," writes Norwegian journalist Seierstad (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, 2015, etc.) toward the end of this insightful but somewhat overlong story of immigrant dreams betrayed. "It was a direction you grew in." Sadiq had come to Norway with his wife from Somalia and there, by hard work and no small travail, had raised two daughters and a son. In late adolescence, having slipped into a gradual fundamentalist outlook, the two daughters vanished only to announce, both defiantly and apologetically, that they were off to battle the infidels on the battlefields of Syria. Their journey led them into a hornet's nest of Islamic State terrorists from every corner of the Muslim world arrayed against a Russian-backed dictatorship; there they plunged ever further into the violent jihadi cause. As the daughters, never quite silent or out of sight, became more religious, the son became more militant in rejecting Islam; part of the value of Seierstad's informative account is to witness the back-and-forth emails among them: "Godis such a self-obsessed asshole that he wants the people he created' to pray to him five times a day and for those who don't believe in him to be killed," writes the son, to which the daughter replies, "instead of talking crap and being offensive try finding the truth or shut up and respect other people's choices." Meanwhile, even as his family was falling apart, Sadiq tried to remove his daughters from Syriano easy matter when they didn't want to leave, standing by their choice to submit to IS."Is it ethically defensible to focus on the lives of two girls when they have not granted their consent?" Seierstad wonders at the end. That is for readers to decide, now knowing much more about what drives people to fanatical causes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
