Tag Archives: Gender inequality

March 29, 2013 · 11:19 am

Bad Girls: Sirens, Jezebels, Murderesses, Thieves, & Other Female Villains by Jane Yolen and Heidi E. Y. Stemple, illustrated by Rebecca Guay

Bad GirlsIf beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, then perhaps bad behavior might be, too. “In this book we are taking a look back through history at all manner of famous female felons,” write mother/daughter author-team Jane Yolen and Heidi E. Y. Stemple (who, between them, have hundreds and hundreds of titles). From as far back as 110 BCE to the 20th century, Bad Girls includes 26 women who have quite the historical rap sheet. But were they all really that bad? “Every crime – no matter how heinous – comes with its own set of circumstances, aggravating and mitigating, which can tip the scales of guilt. And views change.”

Salome, she of the dance of the seven veils who was rewarded with the head of John the Baptist on a platter, might have been just 10 or 11 (!!) and easily manipulated by the adults around her. Bloody Mary was a highly educated, sought-after Princess who was declared suddenly illegitimate, then banished at the whim of her own philandering father King Henry VIII. The slave Tituba, who only did her young charges’ bidding, could only escape hanging if she confessed to being a witch. Madame Alexe Popova helped desperate wives off their cruel husbands – over 300 of those bad boys. Typhoid Mary was never ill herself, but she was a typhoid carrier who wouldn’t let the doctors fix her infection-ridden gallbladder, even for free … if you were healthy, would you submit to the knife?

Decades, centuries, millenia later, how might these women be judged now? “As our world changes, so does our definition of bad,” Yolen and Stemple remind us. “[Y]ou will have to decide for yourself if they were really bad, not so bad, or somewhere in the middle. And perhaps you will see that even the baddest of bad girls may have had a good reason for what she did.”

Admittedly a page-turner – like a mangled train wreck, you can’t look away, except to flip the page – Bad Girls is a unique hybrid of short biographies with a graphic twist: each chapter ends with a graphic novel/manga-style conversation (hurray for Rebecca Guay‘s multi-varied ease in changing styles) between mother and daughter, debating the good, bad, and the often ugly circumstances. Their exchanges are cutesy, off-the-cuff, albeit with a few too many predictable quips – “The Tudors were a nasty bunch. Always sneaking and scheming” gets the expected reply, “Rather like modern politicians.” Yolen seems to be the older, wiser voice while Stemple is quick with her 21st-century judgments of “icky” and apparently more concerned about her wardrobe (her shoe-obsession – misplaced attempt at humor? – seems totally out-of-place). That said, let the bad girls speak for themselves. Read at your own risk … then be sure to decide for yourself.

Tidbit: Younger readers might better enjoy The Thinking Girl’s Treasury of Dastardly Dames, a thus-far seven-title collection featuring women who lived by their own rules (the series and Bad Girls have Cleopatra and (Bloody) Mary Tudor in common). Older readers should definitely check out this TEDxVancouver talk, “The Sociology of Gossip,” about what gossip – especially about supposedly badly-behaved women – says about our so-called modern society. It’s an eye-, ear-, and brain-opener!

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2013

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March 2, 2013 · 9:11 am

Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories by Lauren Groff

Delicate Edible BirdsIf the name Lauren Groff sounds familiar, that might be because her latest title, Arcadia, appears on oh-so-many Best-of-2012 lists. I admit I haven’t yet read Arcadia (it’s high in my ‘must-read’ pile), but if I have the option among an author’s titles, short stories are usually my first choice.

Just as I clicked ‘on’ knowing nothing more than the lauded reputation associated with Groff’s name, I hope not to dampen anyone else’s eyebrow-raising, shudder-inducing surprise factor. That means you might want to stop here, or you’ll have to risk even the bare minimum being too much …

In “Lucky Chow Fun,” the only girl swimmer on the high school team watches as the discovery of a human trafficking operation destroys the idyllic haze that protected her small town. Swimming transforms the legendary real-life 12th-century lovers, Abelard and Heloise, into 20th-century “L. DeBard and Aliette,” an Olympian and his teenaged wheelchair-bound protegé. In ”Majorette,” the oldest daughter in a dysfunctional family finally finds comfort, stability, and lasting happiness. Dysfunction ceaselessly controls the relationship between two intimate friends in ”Blythe.” Always maintaining distance, the ex-pat wives bear witness to the slow destruction of ”The Wife of the Dictator.”

A professional storyteller becomes the wife of a childhood friend in “Watershed,” only to have her narrative cut short. In ”Sir Fleeting,” a Midwestern farm girl reinvents her own personal narrative to eventually match, even surpass, that of the glamorous playboy who appears in and out of her life. In ”Fugue” – so aptly named as the most intricate story in the collection – disintegrating relationships overlap and overpower. And, in ”Delicate Edible Birds,” again, the lone woman among men, this time in a pack of war correspondents during World War II, falls prey to inhumanity.

All nine stories later, I know I chose remarkably well! [Stuck in the ears – narrated by Susan Eriksen who's amply capable of multiple nuanced voices – the collection makes for mesmerizing running/walking/laundry-folding company; you'll just keep going in order to listen!] From absolving to traitorous, from desperate to destructive, each story is a complete narrative to absorb, appreciate, and ultimately admire. Now, Arcadia, here I come!

Readers: Adult

Published: 2009

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February 20, 2013 · 9:20 am

Author Interview: Pauline A. Chen

Red ChamberA couple of days after filing my feature on Pauline A. Chen, I got on the phone to ask her all the questions I couldn’t find answers to out there in the virtual world of google-ing.

True confession moment: I admit I was a wee bit intimidated as the land lines connected us between DC and Cleveland – just what sort of person takes on the most canonical text in Chinese literary history (The Dream of the Red Chamber) and makes it her own (The Red Chamber)? I actually expected a Glenn Close/Cruella de Vil sort of megalomaniacal voice to pick up. Lucky for me, I could put that overactive imagination away, because really, as gutsy as her literary move has been, she’s not at all the hardened character I had dreamt up. Always good to start an interview with a sigh of relief.

Let’s begin with the basics: I understand you spoke rudimentary Chinese as a child because your parents didn’t want their native language to impede their children’s English proficiency. So when and how did you learn Chinese? Which dialect? And are you fluent now?
I took beginning Mandarin in college [Harvard], but the Chinese language program was just getting started at the time, so the classes were not terribly challenging. After I graduated, I spent a year in Taiwan teaching English and that’s when my proficiency really improved, just because I was living in a Chinese-speaking environment. One of my English students in Taiwan introduced me to 9th-century Tang poetry, which I fell in love with – until then I had never imagined that such a developed and sophisticated literary tradition even existed in China.

I came back to the U.S. and went straight to law school, but on the side, I took classes in classical Chinese language and literature. By the time I finished law school, I had realized working over the summers at law firms that I did not want to be an attorney. I went straight into a PhD program in East Asian Studies, and that’s when I began to study Chinese literature in earnest.

I’m pretty fluent in Mandarin, but my training in graduate school focused on reading pre-modern texts – mostly poetry from the fourth century to the ninth century – so I would say I’m stronger in classical Chinese. I can understand quite a bit of Taiwanese, but my attempts to speak it are usually treated with frank derision by native speakers.

You were so certain going into college that you wanted to be a writer. Where did that determination come from?
For as long as I can remember, I liked to write; I had an impulse to make up stories. And reading always gave me such tremendous pleasure. But really, I had no idea what it meant to be writer. Growing up, I never revised anything I wrote, or asked another person for feedback. I just had this dream as a child, but had no comprehension that this was something I had to work towards.

And then during your four years at college, your writerly ambitions just disappeared. How? Why?
The first reason was that at Harvard, students have to apply to get into creative writing courses, and I got into poetry, not fiction. I struggled in the poetry because then, as now, I was fascinated by poetry in other languages – I studied Latin poetry back then – but really didn’t know the English poetic tradition very well. The deeper reason was that I just didn’t know how or what to write. As a teenager I had loved Jane Austen, but at college I started to realize that emulating her style and subject matter would have been faintly ridiculous, and that I needed to find a way to incorporate my own perspective and experience into what I wrote. Years later, when I read V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, I understood that this was what he had experienced when he tried to write like a worldly, Evelyn Waugh-like sophisticate, while trying to suppress his own experience in a peasant family on colonial Trinidad. I also was too undeveloped, too uncomfortable with my own background to use it as a platform from which to write.[... click here for more]

Author interview: “Q&A with Pauline A. Chen,” Bloom, February 20, 2013

Readers: Middle Grade, Adult

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February 18, 2013 · 9:18 am

The Red Chamber by Pauline A. Chen + Author Profile

Red ChamberWhen the teenaged Pauline Chen arrived in Harvard Yard, her intention was to become a writer. The American-born daughter of Taiwanese parents, she grew up amidst Long Island’s endless strip malls and was determined – she wrote in July 2012 at Tribute Books – to shed her “provincial” upbringing. By the time Chen graduated in 1986, she had reinvented herself as an “international sophisticate” whose literary preferences had “distinctly European sensibilities: cigarettes and grappa at Parisian cafés; country dances and muslin frocks in a Derbyshire ballroom.” Her undergraduate degree was earned in Classics, and belied a particular interest in Latin poetry.

During her four years in Cambridge, she shed her “frizzy perm and Long Guyland accent,” but gone, too, by the time she graduated, were her authorly ambitions: “… I stopped feeling that I had anything to say. My writing dried up; I did not understand that the experiences which made me nervous and uncomfortable, which I was quick to bury, also made me creative.”

Although she didn’t create, she also didn’t stray too far from the page. After Harvard, she went to Yale Law School and got her JD. She went south to Princeton where she finished a PhD in East Asian Studies with an emphasis on reading pre-modern Chinese poetry from the fourth to ninth century in original classical Chinese. She had stopovers in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where she honed the rudimentary Mandarin of her childhood into fluency, before settling in “most alien of all” – Ohio – to become a professor of Chinese language and literature, squarely on the tenure track. She got married. She had a child.

And then she got cancer.

Diagnosed with a rare, highly aggressive ovarian cancer in 2001 just weeks after giving birth to her son, Chen returned to some of the comforts of her childhood when her mother moved from New York to Ohio, to take over Chen’s family’s care. Chen’s mother… mothered: she cooked, cleaned, and cooed over her newborn grandson. When the chemo erased Chen’s appetite, her mother’s rice was sometimes her only nourishment. When her baby cried, only his grandmother could comfort him. When Chen required more advanced treatment in another state, Chen’s mother took full charge, following her daughter with her grandson, setting up a new apartment, and smoothly continuing her patient care.

Chen’s mother’s “generosity and talents … enabled [her] to survive,” Chen wrote at Goodreads in September 2012. Before her cancer, Chen’s focus was honed on her demanding academic career and the financial independence it offered, which she thought set her far apart from her traditional mother who had arrived in the U.S. to pursue a PhD in Pharmacology but chose to stay home after her eldest was born with a congenital defect (from which she eventually recovered). Not until her youngest of three children entered school did she get her pharmacist’s license, with which she worked in hospitals for the next 30 years. Growing up, Chen internalized the contempt with which her engineering professor father treated her mother: “I had always failed to give her credit for her talents, for the very reason that she had chosen to devote them to the service of those she loved, rather than to the professional realm.” Only as an adult – and a cancer patient relying on her mother’s unconditional support – did she recognize the “idyllic period of our childhood”: “For years I deplored my childhood circumstances as narrow. In fact my parents had lived on two continents and spoke three languages. All along the narrowness had been in my own vision—and I had had to travel to the ends of the earth in order to see the place that I had come from.” [... click here for more]

Author profile: “Pauline A. Chen and The Red Chamber: ” … to finish the story for myself,” Bloom, February 18, 2013

Tidbit: Click here for my review of The Red Chamber, originally published in Library Journal. Click here for my review of Peiling and the Chicken-Fried Christmas in BookDragon. And click here for a follow-up Q&A with Chen.

Readers: Adult

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January 30, 2013 · 3:00 pm

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis

Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa ParksAlready designated “definitive political biography” on its back cover, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Brooklyn College political science professor Jeanne Theoharis will reside in my personal reading history as the most difficult book I’ve ever reviewed. Never before – and hopefully never again – have I faced such a vast divide between significant content and frustrating execution. As the most exhaustively researched biography thus far on Rosa Parks, Theoharis’ new title is inarguably an essential addition to any library or classroom, and yet readers will need serious patience to sift through tedious repetition, fragmented chronology, and countless “might have/could have” assumptions to reach the final page.

Fable, myth, caricature are not words historically linked to Rosa Parks, who is publicly remembered as the quiet, tired seamstress whose refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus sparked the U.S. civil rights movement. When she died at 92 in 2005, Parks became the first woman and second African American to have her body lie in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda; 40,000 – including President and Mrs. George W. Bush – bore witness, with additional mourners paying tribute at overflowing memorials held in Montgomery, and Detroit, where Parks spent more than half of her life.

“[T]he woman who emerged in the public tribute bore only a fuzzy resemblance to Rosa Louise Parks,” Theoharis proves. “[R]epeatedly defined by one solitary act on the bus,” Theoharis insists Parks was “stripped of her lifelong history of activism and anger at American injustice.” Instead, “the public spectacle provided an opportunity for the nation to lay rest a national heroine and its own history of racism.” In other words: 50 years earlier, this tired woman couldn’t sit on a bus, but look where she’s lying now.

Theoharis “was captivated and then horrified by the national spectacle made of her death.” She gave a talk about “its caricature of [Parks] and, by extension, its misrepresentation of the civil rights movement,” which she was asked to turn into an article: “It became clear how little we actually knew about Rosa Parks.” Even Rosa Parks: A Life, the biography by lauded historian Douglas Brinkley, “is “pocket-sized, un-footnoted,” while the autobiography Parks wrote with Jim Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story, is targeted for young adult readers. “[T]he lack of scholarly monograph on Parks,” Theoharis observes, “is notable.”

More than a personal biography, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Theoharis uses the honorific Mrs. to add “a degree of dignity, distance, and formality to mark that she is not fully ours as a nation to appropriate”) is a political reclamation of Parks’ almost-70 years of activism. As the grandchild of slaves, Parks knew “[f]rom an early age, … ‘we were not free.’” Pushed by her mother, a teacher, towards an education, “her discovery of black history in high school was transformative.” Family responsibilities kept Parks from finishing 11th grade; she wanted to be nurse or social worker, never a teacher after the “’humiliation and intimidation’” she watched her mother endure. Her husband Raymond Parks was “’the first real activist I ever met.’”

Her acts of resistance began small and early – she refused to drink from segregated water fountains – then public and even life-threatening – she registered to vote and assisted others “despite enormous poll taxes and the unfair registration tests.” She was Montgomery’s NAACP secretary, long aligned with controversial activist E.D. Nixon; she experienced interracial leadership training and race equality at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. [... click here for more]

Review: Christian Science Monitor, January 30, 2013

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2013

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December 23, 2012 · 10:05 am

Distant View of a Minaret by Alifa Rifaat, translated by Denys Johnson-Davis

Given the monumental (continuous) changes post-Arab Spring, my recent (ongoing) search for women’s voices before and after led me to an unusual writer who defies many expectations of what it means to be internationally literary: Alifa Rifaat lives and works in a traditional Egyptian Muslim society (this collection was first published in English translation almost three decades ago), she does not have a university education (her family married her off instead), she speaks a single language which means her reading is restricted to literature available only in Arabic, and the only time she has left her provincial Egyptian life is for religious pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina.

“At first consideration this would appear an uncompromising background for a writer of fiction,” notes her translator Denys Johnson-Davies (the notable nonagenarian and revered translator of Nobel-ist Naguib Mahfouz, Mahmud Darwish, Tayed Salih, and many more), “yet it is these very limitations that have imposed upon her writing its freshness and actuality. Most of her stories express, implicitly rather than explicitly, a revolt against many of the norms and attitudes, particularly those related to woman and her place in society.” Rifaat’s protests are less political than they are just simply human: men should behave kindly towards women – “as enjoined by the Qur’an” – and when they don’t, women turn to “contempt and rebellion.”

In the titular “Distant View of a Minaret,” a woman long denied fulfillment in marriage surprises herself by calmly pouring herself a cup of coffee immediately after her husband’s death. In “An Incident in the Ghobashi Household,” a woman figures out to save her daughter and therefore her family. In “Badriyya and Her Husband,” a lonely wife whose husband returns from prison, is proverbially “the last to know” but she finally contemplates how she will “find the strength not to open the door to him.” In “My World of the Unknown,” a woman embarks on a mysterious affair that may or may not be real, but more importantly provides her great joy and pleasure. In “The Flat on Nakshabandi Street,” an elderly maiden aunt who lives with her bachelor nephew watches life go by (and plots her daily machinations) from her window seat overlooking the street below.

The majority of Rifaat’s 15 short stories here underline how difficult basic consideration between the sexes seems to be. In her immediate world tightly circumscribed by traditional, religious, and societal expectations, a sense of resigned regret undeniably looms, but lest you dismiss the Rifaat’s writing as bleak and disheartening, be assured that many of the women here find their own ways of surviving, and even thriving.

Tidbit: What a surprise to find the eminent Denys Johnson-Davis on BookDragon (!) as the author of a children’s book, Goha the Wise Fool. Clearly I don’t even know my own content, but Johnson-Davis’ creativity sure is prodigious!

Readers: Adult

Published: 1983, 1985 (United Kingdom), 1987 (United States)

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October 21, 2012 · 3:28 pm

The Thinking Girl’s Treasury of Dastardly Dames | Njinga: “The Warrior Queen” by Janie Havemeyer, illustrated by Peter Malone

Those Dastardly Dames are increasing their fold (yippeee!), this time to welcome a 16th-century West African queen named Njinga, meaning “twist,” because she was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck! She certainly found her fighting spirit early on: as the eldest daughter of a king and a slave woman, Njinga was trained by her father “to think like a ruler and fight like a warrior” even though she couldn’t inherit the throne merely because of her gender.

Traditions aside, when her incompetent half-brother loses their kingdom to the Portuguese who are thriving on an ever-growing, gruesome slave trade, Njinga quickly  realizes “her kingdom needed her” and proves to be a skillful negotiator – with and without weapons. Little impedes her progress toward reclaiming and establishing her kingdom: murder, intrigue, slavery, human sacrifices, even conversion to Catholicism (!) become de rigueur in establishing her power. If you wanted to survive, you did as you were told!

Inspiringly girl-powered Goosebottom Books once again introduces readers to another fascinating, frightening historical figure. As in each installment of The Thinking Girl’s Treasuries of Dastardly Dames, the implicit question looms, ‘what price power?’ ‘Twisted’ Njinga surely had her share of challenging options and seems to have made some of the more grislier choices.

What, indeed, might each of us have done …? Here’s one thing for sure: Goosebottom’s gooses surely are channeling 1991 Pulitzer Prize winner, Harvard history professor (and Mormon!) Laurel Thatcher Ulrich‘s oft-quoted book title, ”Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Amen to that!

Readers: Children, Middle Grade

Published: 2012

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September 20, 2012 · 10:04 am

My Name is Parvana by Deborah Ellis

What delighted anticipation I felt when I heard that Deborah Ellis‘ multi-award-winning Breadwinner Trilogy (The Breadwinner, Parvana’s Journey, and Mud City), after almost a decade since its completion, was becoming a tetrology! I adamantly hoped for such at the end of my Mud City post: “Although the trilogy is seemingly finished, adding a final fourth which captures Shauzia and Parvana’s reunion would surely be welcome … “

I swear, I didn’t know a thing back then … but if the book gods are feeling ‘ask-and-you-shall-receive’-sort of generous right about now, might I put forth a request that an octology might be in order for the future? If I’m gonna ask, I might as well ask big!

Parvana is 15, and a prisoner who refuses to speak to the American soldiers who question, frighten, even threaten her. Found alone in the bombed-out rubble of a village school, Parvana’s interrogators insist she’s a terrorist and harass her day and night about her involvement. In spite of her fearful silence, for the first time, Parvana has a clean room to herself; someone with a conscience recognizes she’s still a child and doesn’t throw her in with adults, while someone else has a heart and slips her food against orders. And even though her captors insist on piping in Donny Osmond’s cloying “Puppy Love” at ridiculous decibels at all hours, Parvana is still able to slip into her past, and remember her mother’s dedication to educating girls regardless of the growing threats, her fights and quibbles with her older sister Nooria and adopted brother Asif, her decision not to reveal the gatekeeper Mr. Fahir’s secret, the villagers’ chilling reactions to the opening of Leila’s Academy of Hope … and how she ended up an American prisoner.

Reading – and recalling the books she once read – helps Parvana stay sane, from the packaged food wrappers to the Robert Frost poem she remembers with longing. “Who would want to shoot somebody after reading ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening’ or ‘Casey at the Bat’?,” she muses, envisioning how soldiers might stop their fighting to read each other “a great poem,” or swap chapters printed on ration wrappers with one another until whole books were pieced together. While she dreams she could be hired to choose such books, she tries hard not to think about the women who torture prisoners: “Women in the West could do anything they wanted. So why would they choose to do that?”

With still widespread social problems like child marriage and other brutality against women and girls, unpunished deaths, and references to Abu Ghraib, Parvana is a sobering read. Ellis depicts post-Taliban Afghanistan with eyes wide open, sugar-coating nothing. As foreign countries plan withdrawal from an unstable country still mired in poverty and violence, Ellis notes, “the war continues, and it is not clear who might be the winner in the end.”

While governments battle, life goes on for the Afghan people. “Individuals like Parvana, Shauzi, and Mrs. Weera are working to make life better. They, and the many many Afghan women, men, and children like them, are the ones the world needs to support. We owe it to them.” Ellis’s own support is especially inspiring: she’s raised over a million dollars in royalties for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and Street Kid International with the first three Breadwinner titles alone. As Parvana’s story continues, imagine how a few more titles will add to Ellis’ golden giving pot!

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2012

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September 16, 2012 · 12:20 pm

The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad, translated by Ingrid Christophersen

Okay, here we go again (see Kabul Beauty School below). We have a (fascinating, allegedly true) story, and then the (disturbing) story about the (now accuracy-challenged) story.

Just after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, an award-winning Norwegian journalist emerges from six weeks of following Northern Alliance commandos all over Afghanistan and moves into (invited!) the home of a Kabul bookseller, Sultan Khan (not his name), for three months in order to write a book about him and his extended family. “A bookseller’s family is unusual in a country where three-quarters of the population can neither read nor write,” she explains. That Khan has survived for decades as a bookseller is near miraculous: “‘First the Communists burned my books, then the Mujahedeen looted and pillaged, finally the Taliban burned them all over again,’” he tells Seierstad. Still, he managed to keep his family “kind of middle class, if you can use that expression in Afghanistan,” with enough money and food to never go hungry. Some were educated and could read and write in multiple languages. [Seierstad herself is fluent in five languages.]

Seierstad chose Khan for his atypical devotion to literature, learning, culture, and history, rare in a society oppressed by fundamentalist Islam and mired in post-war destruction, poverty, and chaos. But by book’s end, Khan sadly proves himself to be “‘very typical,’” Seierstad admits in an accompanying 2003 interview in the book’s reading guide. “‘He’s an Afghan patriarch like everybody else’”: he bullies and rules his family, especially the women; at 50-plus, he takes an illiterate teenaged distant relative as his second wife when he decides his first wife (a qualified Persian language teacher) is too old after bearing him three sons and a daughter; he allows his eldest son Mansur to openly berate and demean any and all of their female relatives; he refuses to support his youngest sister’s desire to continue her education or pursue a teaching career, treating her no better than he would a servant. Seierstad says she did her best to keep her opinions out of her reportage: “‘If I wanted to say, ‘That’s not how we do it in Norway,’ that this is not fair, I would suddenly not get the true story.’”

So the story about that true story, of course, begins with its international bestseller status: first comes fame, then comes controversy. Sultan Khan’s real name is Shah Muhammad Rais. So well known is he in Kabul that merely disguising his name didn’t protect his anonymity. He and his family sued Seierstad for defamation soon after the book’s global success; in July 2010, a Norway court ordered Seierstad to pay Rais’ young wife a substantial sum in damages, but that decision was overturned over a year later. In the midst of legal battles, both wives, fearing for their safety, fled Afghanistan; one lives in Canada, the other in Norway. In 2007, Rais published his own version of his story, Once Upon a Time There Was a Bookseller in Kabul (available on Amazon!).

Once again, here is yet another case of ‘she said, he said’ … once more, the oft-repeated literary question looms: in the (countless) cases of an outsider looking into a country, culture, people not his or her own, is neutrality ever possible?

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2003 (United States)

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Audio, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, .Translation, Afghan, European

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September 14, 2012 · 6:14 pm

Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil by Deborah Rodriguez and Kristin Ohlson

Writing a memoir these days is dangerous business: you can be outed on Oprah as the worst liar, along with your publisher (James Frey, A Million Little Pieces), you can become infamous overnight for breaking the hearts of millions who not only trusted you but even gave up their lunch money to fund you (Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea), and most recently, you can face death threats even before your book was released (Mark Owen who is really Matt Bissonnette, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden, which, incidentally, finally knocked Fifty Shades of Grey off its #1 bestseller perch just yesterday). Certain memoirs (and, of course, other books – Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses must be the most-unread-best-known-title in the world!) have two very distinct paths: there’s the story, and then the story about the story.

So here’s Deborah Rodriguez‘s tale, which I both enjoyed (Rodriguez is a larger-than-life nutter, and I mean that with all respect) and shuddered through (she’s writing about Afghanistan, where women have experienced continuing violence almost all their lives). Thanks to Bernadette Dunne (who also expertly reads Amy Waldman’s The Submission), the audible version provides the perfect combination of bemusement and shock.

Escaping a dangerous second marriage to Michigan preacher, Rodriguez travels to Afghanistan in 2002, initially with a Christian NGO of professional volunteers (doctors, dentists, nurses) among whom she feels less than useful, but finds her hairdressing skills are in even greater demand.

She gets the crazy idea to start a beauty school in Kabul – vanity and beauty are indeed universal, even in the most oppressive societies – and finds initial funding from longtime Afghan supporter Mary MacMakin, founder of the decades-old successful NGO PARSA. Brash, feisty, do-before-you-think Rodriguez makes her beauty dreams come true, not only reclaiming her own independence (although she marries hubby #3 – a former mujahideen who already has a wife and seven children! – after 20 days!), but provides many desperate young Afghan women – who are more property than human – marketable skills, a career, and even the courage to break the cycle of isolated abuse all too common in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Beyond Rodriguez’s story – which quickly became a bestseller, with film rights sold for a substantial enough sum to merit Sandra Bullock allegedly attached as the star (IMDB lists a 2013 release; not to be confused with the documentary, The Beauty Academy of Kabul) – is, of course, the story about her story. Soon after its April 2007 debut, insider naysayers had convincing evidence as to many inaccuracies and inconsistencies on the school’s founding, funding, and success. While some of that grumbling might be ignored, the more serious consequences of the memoir’s publication – and Rodriguez’s tell-all style – is the life-and-death situation it created for some of her Kabul students and friends. Rodriguez and her son had to flee Afghanistan under threat of violence in 2007; meanwhile, a chilling NPR segment reported “Topekai” was expecting to move to Pakistan, “Baseera” expected her own death. Rodriquez has since published a novel, The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul, in March of this year, and is now living in Mexico.

“Afghan women … have been held in the dark for so long, and during the darkest years they suffered more than even I can imagine.” Rodriguez writes at book’s end. “But the darkness has been pulled back a bit. The light is starting to fall on them now. They need the world to look, watch, and make sure nothing puts out that light again.” Here’s hoping, praying, demanding!

Readers: Adult

Published: 2007

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Afghan, Nonethnic-specific

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