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Book Reviewed by:A powerful novel about war, family and love, from the bestselling, prize-winning author dubbed 'Pakistan's brightest voice.' (Guardian)
An American pilot crash lands in the desert and takes refuge in the very camp he was supposed to bomb. Hallucinating palm trees and worrying about dehydrating to death isn't what Major Ellie expected from this mission. Still, it's an improvement on the constant squabbles with his wife back home. In the camp, teenager Momo's money-making schemes are failing. His brother left for his first day at work and never returned, his parents are at each other's throats, his dog is having a very bad day, and an aid worker has shown up wanting to research him for her book on the Teenage Muslim Mind. Written with his trademark wit, keen eye for absurdity and telling important truths about the world today, Red Birds reveals master storyteller Mohammed Hanif at the height of his powers.
Paperback original.
Chapter 1
Ellie
On the third day, I find the plane. I'd been looking for something to eat or drink, anything of nutritional value really. I know that I can't survive for long on the measly rations in my survival kit. A ripped parachute and regulation sunglasses were all I had found on my bruised ass when I came to. Roving Angels would be on their way to rescue me, but sometimes Angels can take their time and in order for this rescue to be successful I need to stay alive.
I unzip my survival kit again to inspect its contents, the things that will keep me alive.
Four energy bars.
Two vitamin smoothies.
A roll of surgical cotton.
A roll of surgical gauze.
Needle and thread.
They give you a 65-million-dollar machine to fly, with the smartest bomb that some beam rider in Salt Lake City took years to design, you burn fuel at the rate of fifteen gallons per second and if you get screwed they expect you to survive on four energy bars and an organic smoothie. And look, a mini pack of ...
Red Birds, Mohmmed Hanif's latest novel, is part Catch-22, part Slaughterhouse-Five, part Kafka's The Castle, and all Hanif's darkly satirical wit and wildly creative imagination. It gives the very slightest taste, one imagines, of the uncertainty of a war zone, and that taste is what Hanif wanted to accomplish...continued
Full Review
(1062 words)
(Reviewed by Naomi Benaron).
The attacks of September 11, 2001 and the United States' subsequent military response fundamentally changed the political landscape of the Middle East/Central-South Asia. This landscape is the setting of Red Birds by Mohammed Hanif, who declared one of the goals of this project to "take the readers by the hand to lead them out of the comfort of their living rooms and into another space," the space of the human cost of the wars in this region. In 2011, The Cost of War Project,"a team of 35 scholars, legal experts, human rights practitioners, and physicians" came together at the Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs at Brown University in an attempt to independently quantify the human and economic costs of the Iraq and ...
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