Milwaukee's Journal Sentinel reviews My Year Inside Radical Islam
Last Friday, the Journal Sentinel published an article entitled, Ahead: Books that look back, which featured a number of forthcoming non-fiction novels for 2007. Daveed's book, My Year Inside Radical Islam, is reviewed near the end.
Ahead: Books that look back
By: Greta Sharma-Jensen
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
January 12, 2007
Last Sunday, we checked out some new and upcoming fiction. This week, it's non-fiction's turn. Or rather, the memoirist's turn. U.S. publishers are bringing out such a fine list of new memoirs that readers could easily ignore all other non-fiction titles this season and not feel deprived.
Near narcissism has its attractions when it comes as literature. And when it opens doors to other worlds, brave and sad and true, it can be inspiring, riveting, transporting, humbling. It can even make you forgive workmanlike prose.
"You will never forget Ishmael Beah," e-mailed the publicist from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I rolled my eyes when I read it but now suspect that readers will agree with her. Beah, who came to the U.S. when he was 17, is the author of "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier," which FSG will publish next month.
Truly, how can you forget Beah when his is the story of survival as a child soldier in Sierra Leone for three years? Now 25 and an Oberlin College graduate, he lives in New York City.
Then there's the equally interesting "Ace of Spades," by David Matthews, who was raised by his black father after his white, Jewish mother left them. His bi-racial state confused him: "I was all of those things, black, white, Jewish, abandoned, and none of them," he writes in his coming memoir. He describes growing up in Baltimore during the '70s and '80s and though he could easily pass for either black or white, he had difficulty finding an identity that fit.
In "Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant," Daniel Tammet leads us into his mind - the computer-like world where he can learn Icelandic in a week and multiply huge sums. Tammet, a 27-year-old with Asperger's syndrome, tells his story from his frustrating childhood to his years as an independent adult. A Britisher, his achievements have included teaching in Lithuania. He's one of few people with both synesthesia and autism. This title is just out from Free Press.
"The Eighth Promise: An American Son's Tribute to His Toisanese Mother" won a starred review from Publishers Weekly, the industry magazine. In alternating accounts, William Poy Lee and his mother tell the story of their life in San Francisco beginning in the 1950s in Chinatown. This memoir, published by Rodale Books, is an affecting meditation on home and ancestral land. The title comes from the eight promises Lee's mother made to her own mother. Among the promises: that she would cook traditional soups.
If "The Eighth Promise" tells of the perennial U.S. immigrant experience, "My Year Inside Radical Islam: A Memoir" tells of a different kind of immigrant experience. In this unusual story, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, the son of freethinking Jews in Oregon, gets drawn into radical orthodox Islam, even working for a charity that funds terrorists. Eventually, though, he rejects the group's hatreds, embraces Christianity and becomes an FBI informant. Truth as fiction? No. Truth as truth.
Two other new, page-turning memoirs: "The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival," by Stanley Alpert, which Putnam's Sons just released, and "Cooked: From the Streets to the Stove, from Cocaine to Foi Gras" by Jeff Henderson.
Alpert, a former U.S. attorney, tells a tart and taut tale of being kidnapped at gunpoint in New York just before his 38th birthday.
And "Cooked" - the title says it all. A prisoner once; now a chef. From Morrow, in March.