Books About Women

day

btw, i cudnt get my hands on mukhtar mai..still persuading my friend to order that book for me..

mykiwi

she wrote another book " A promise to Nadia" in hope she can help bring back Nadia to England.

mardhiah12

we have a discussion regarding khaled hosseini's books here
perhaps you can chip in

http://forum.cari.com.my/viewthr ... &extra=page%3D1

mykiwi

ok,noted

hamizao

There is this book from the mother's experience


By courtesy of amazon......

Review
A vivid and gripping picture - Sunday Times Extremely moving - Manchester Evening News What is astonishing about the book...is the account of how downtrodden, defeated Miriam suddenyl came to buoyand life - Mail on Sunday

In Sold, Zana Muhsen told the story of how she and her younger sister, Nadia, were sold by their father as brides to Yemeni bridegrooms. Zana was 15, her sister 14. Although both the British and Yemeni governments declared this illegal, the Yemeni government did nothing to return the girls to their mother in Britain, and claimed that the girls were happy to remain there. Only a long fight by their mother enabled Zana to return, leaving behind her son, but Nadia's husband refused to allow her to leave. Now, Miriam Ali tells the story of her life with Muthana Muhsen, father of Zana and Nadia. It was a constant round of pregnancy and hard work, as Muthana confined his common-law wife and children to one room in Birmingham. The two eldest children were taken to Yemen to visit their grandparents, and left there. Miriam would not be reunited with them for many years. Nevetheless, it was not until Zana and Nadia were sold that she finally left Muthana and commenced the long battle to rescue her children. Miriam Ali's story is one of remarkable courage, and also compassion for others, as, in the midst of her own difficulties, she was able to found a charity, Lost Children International, to support other people like herself. (Kirkus UK)

Product Description
Providing an account of her battle with an abusive man and with bureaucracy, this is the story of a woman's fight against a violent and tyrannical relationship, and her struggle to reclaim her two daughters, sold into marriage in the Yemen. Mirian Kamouhi - half Pakistani, half English - met Muthana Muhsen in Birmingham in 1960, when she was 17. They never married, but had seven children, the two eldest of whom were sent to Yemen in 1966 for a holiday . Their mother, fighting ill-health and with little money, would not meet them again until they were adults.


Personally, I find the book an example of  repressive attitude towards women to the  extreme. For Nadia, she had to accept her fate as her hubby threatened
throwing her out and keeping her child. I wonder what kind of relationship they must have. She reckoned it is the Islamic thing that she could not go with  her mum to England without her husband's will.

day

wow..thanks for the info..

limau_nipis

Originally posted by hamizao at 31/10/08 09:45 PM

Care to share a thing or two about the central theme perhaps?

oh my.. i totally miss this out
you can chek under Faisal Tehranni's thread my review about the book

central theme is about
penanaman betik oleh seorang gadis bernama salsabila fahim
dibantu oleh rakannya teh sofia

of course, it did feel different.. since a man is writing with a woman's view point

hamizao

Originally posted by day at 3-12-2008 11:42 AM
btw, i cudnt get my hands on mukhtar mai..still persuading my friend to order that book for me..

Your friend is working for a bookstore? Hope you are successful. Makes me think am blessed to be a Malaysian...really!

hamizao

Uuuuuui, can a man REALLY think and feel like a woman?But then it is fiction, right?

hamizao

From The Washington Post:
Millions of Iranian women were sidelined by Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, but few fought back the way Shirin Ebadi did. She had become Iran's foremost woman jurist by the 1970s, but Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's theocracy stripped her of her judgeship in 1980. Her steely tenacity enabled her to take on a new role as a human rights lawyer battling for justice in Iran's revolutionary courts -- a fight that won her the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize and brought her face to face with the terror her clients confronted. In the fall of 2000, as she studied a dossier about the premeditated killings of dissidents that was made available after a judicial investigation, her gaze fell on a chilling sentence: "The next person to be killed is Shirin Ebadi."
Her new memoir, Iran Awakening, is a riveting account of a brave, lonely struggle to take Islamist jurists to task for betraying the promises of their own revolution. Life was supposed to improve for Iranians after the despotic rule of the U.S.-backed shah. But rather than protect its citizens, the new government set upon a cruel track. Ebadi's tale is told from the perspective of an ordinary mother and an extraordinary lawyer determined, despite the ruthless reign of the ayatollahs, to do what is right. In her dealings with the grim and arbitrary judicial machinery in Islamist Iran, Ebadi demonstrates that her own patriotism is beyond reproach. She faces her foes with cunning and the quiet calculation of a superb chess player. The resulting book (written with the help of Azadeh Moaveni, a Time magazine correspondent) sometimes reads like a police thriller, its drama heightened by Ebadi's determination to keep up the quotidian aspects of her family life. She goes through the daily rituals of washing dishes and mincing fresh herbs before dinner, preparing meals ahead of time as she maps out her game plan to embarrass the regime. Iran Awakening is not a literary work but an insider's view of the merciless daily grind that drives women to struggle, submission or suicide. Ebadi's reactions are sometimes movingly normal, as when she tries to insulate her two daughters from the terror by doing something as different as taking them skiing -- which, it turns out, requires this 40-something mom to get permission from her own mother. The description of her own imprisonment -- she was jailed in June 2000 for videotaping the testimony of a key witness in the case of a young activist killed during the previous year's student riots -- offers a rare glimpse inside Tehran's notorious Evin prison. One guard, assuming that any female inmate must be a prostitute, asks the dignified dissident whether she is there "for a moral offense," which reduces her to hysterical laughter. Her mirth soon fades. "It was so odd to me, how the rhythm of prison life became familiar," she writes. "The personality quirks of the guards, the dank, dusty smell of the cells, even the howls of the addicts seemed normal to me after a couple of days." Despite her opinion of the ruling mullahs, Ebadi continues to believe that Islam, or a progressive version of it, is compatible with modern democracy. Not everyone will agree with her, but her passion to prove the point is formidable. Returning home three years ago as a Nobel laureate, she was greeted at Tehran's airport by a mostly female throng, including a group of students singing "Yar-e Dabestani," the adopted anthem of Iran's "young pro-democracy organizers," a sorrowful, bittersweet yet galvanizing song used to lift spirits at sit-ins and gatherings. Its lyrics ask, "Whose hands but mine and yours can pull back these curtains?" Those curtains are far from lifted. "I am not free enough to write what I want to write," Ebadi said in a recent interview. But she adds: "I am willing to be tried in any court for what I said in this book." It is being published in 16 languages. But not Farsi, the language of Iran.