Bingo Board Review: I am Malala. The girl who stood up for education and was shot by the Taleban by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb

I have been meaning to get my hands on this book for a while, and having set myself a goal of reading 12 non-fiction books this year AND placing this specific book on my 2017 Bingo Board I figured it was time to buckle down and do it!


I think we all know who Malala is. As the title says she was the girl who stood up for education and was shot by the Taleban. I had never heard of her before she was shot and it was all over the news. I thought she was more or less randomly targeted by the Taleban and only took up her fight for education for girls after the fact. But it turns out that she did a great deal of campaigning and activism before she was shot, and this was the reason she was targeted. 

In this book we learn about her life mostly before the shots and we see how her home in Pakistan slowly but securely came under the thumb of the Taleban. Meanwhile Malala and her father, himself an avid activist for education, fight to keep Pakistan from turning into the Taleban controlled Afghanistan with all the many restrictions placed on the people there. We follow Malala’s life in great detail up until she is shot. The last few chapters detail her recovery and her continued work for girls’ rights to education. But the main part of the book is about her life before the shooting. 

As I mentioned above I thought Malala was targeted simply because she went to school, so I figured this book would be about the time after she was shot and how she turned that into a platform for activism. At first I was perhaps a little disappointed, but I quickly saw that I had it wrong and I enjoyed learning about her life before, and the way she and her father built their platform. I would have liked to learn a bit more about her work and life after the attack, but there is still a lot to do on that front so I guess there is hope for another book in the future. 

I enjoyed Malala’ voice and thought she captured her society very well. I also enjoyed how she didn’t hesitate to call out the bad things in her society, and how she took action to try and change what she didn’t like. I think most people could learn a lot from Malala. 


I gave this book 3,5 stars on Goodreads because while I did enjoy it, I did find it a bit unstructured some times, and as I said I would have liked to see a little more of her work after the attack. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1000 Places to See Before You Die 20 - Acropolis, Athens, Greece

Image
You cannot go to Athens and not go to the Acropolis. It is a staple on any sightseeing tour and is likely to be crawling with tourists at any given point in time. Still, it is definitely worth it to brave the masses and see the fortified citadel above the city of Athens for yourself.   The word acropolis means the highest point of the city, and there are a number of these acropoleis scattered throughout Greece, but the one in Athens is so well known that it is simply called “The Acropolis”.  There is evidence that the area on the rocky outcropping overlooking the city was inhabited already in the 4th millennium BC, but it was Pericles who started construction on the many famous buildings in the 5th century BC. These famous buildings include the Parthenon, probably the most iconic of the buildings, the Propylaea, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike. These buildings were all seriously damaged in 1687 AD when the Venetians had sieged the city and used th
Read more

Reading the classics: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The book The book first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, and the year after it was released as a book in a revised edition. As I am working on this post, I discover that the book is not necessarily considered a classic….great choice for the kick-off post for the series then! However, in my experience, it does usually appear on “classics” lists, so I am going to count it! At the time of the first publication in 1890 it was considered immoral, by a lot of people, but Wilde took offense to that and defended his story. When it was published in book form though, he had changed some things and added a preface, that stated that books cannot be moral or immoral, only well written or badly written.  The author Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was Wilde’s full name, but he later changed it to Oscar Wilde because, as he said, the name was too long for someone who was going to be famous. He was born on October 16th 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. He went to Trinity Co
Read more

Review: Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Image
This is the first book in a series, but I have no intention of continuing on with this series. The plot evolves around two young people, Amy and Elder. They live on a spaceship that has left Earth to find a new planet to populate. Amy was part of the cryogeniccaly frozen people on board, meant to be woken up upon arrival and using their skill set to populate the new planet. Elder, meanwhile, is part of the population that has been keeping the ship running whilst it travels towards its destination.  One day Amy is woken up from her frozen sleep and now she must learn to live on this spaceship, without her parents, slowly learning the culture and the secrets of this ship. It turns out there is an abundance of mysteries on board this ship, like who is waking up (and killing) the frozen people, who is the mysterious deceased Elder, what is the current Eldest up to and what’s with the “crazy” people and their medication.  Eventually all these mysteries are solved, but is
Read more