Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Infidel
Book Review: A total farce
Summary: 1 Stars
This woman got her education given by her parent, not after she left the pre-destined life. Her family disputed that her calim that she was forced into a marriage. A family like her in society is not an average family that would so such a thing. If she didn't like the guy, she'd not have bene forced to. She is just an opportunist who used whatever lies she could to get a residency in a western country.Book Review: A trip to another culture, a meeting with a great Lady
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is the best book I have read lately. When I started I could not stop. It is actual, it is informative, it is passionate, it is true and it got me out of my western life on to a trip to Somalia, to Africa, to customs that I suspected but never could get a full grasp. No fiction, facts, but facts delivered with sensitivity, passion, love. After reading the book I want to meet Ayaan Hirsi Ali in person. I feel I know her, she is my daughter, my friend, somebody to look up to because of her courage, her intelligence and the hope she gives to the world. She is moving forward and will make things move forward. She dared to connect with the West and to be true about what she found, choosing education and knowledge versus dogmatism and ignorance. A friend loaned me this book, my husband is reading it, now I am buying it for my friends. This book is a real gift by its content itself. It already spreaded but will continue. People like Ayaan Hirsi are the bridge needed between the Middle East and the West to find effective solutions. She respects her roots, her parents, her friends, her readers, but takes a firm stand and affirmation of the democratic and freedom values that she found in the west even though her life is at stakes.
I advise this book to anybody. It is an eye opener on what is really going on between the middle East and the West.
Book Review: A truly eye opening story
Summary: 5 Stars
Occasionally a book you reads changes your whole way of looking at the world. Infidel was one of those books for me. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has lead an amazing life and her story needs to be told the world over. This book changed the way I viewed the non western world, religion, America, Africa, politics, and the plight of women around the globe. It made me realize how fortunate we are in America and how blind most of us are to what's going on outside our borders. It inspired me that someone who came from such a challenging past could accomplish the many things Ms. Hirsi Ali has accomplished by such a young age. I intend to read this book again and encourage all of my friends to read it as well.Book Review: A very important read in today's world
Summary: 5 Stars
Ms. Ali does a great job of putting us non-muslim's in the mind of a muslim. Her experiences growing up are eye-opening! An important read for all of us. I could not put down the book!
Jim Mullaney
Fairfield OH
Book Review: A vivid chronicle of a triumphant escape from cultural confinement
Summary: 5 Stars
Autobiographies often suffer from late-life authorship--a time when the fires are damped and the events foreshortened by time. This one--by a woman still in her thirties--is an exception to nearly every rule of the genre. Not least for its electrifying readability: it consumed every free moment of the two days it took to finish it. Putting it down was simply not an option.
This book will grab your imagination like no other, transplant you into a world you have probably never known, and introduce you to the intimate world of a muslim family swept by circumstance all over Africa, Arabia, and Europe. The complex interaction of tribes, clans, cultures, extended families and nations (and their consequences) isn't dryly analyzed, it is woven into a personal drama with the momentum of a locomotive. The love of family rides perilously over the jarring railbed of refugee life, of ancient and modern Islamic conflicts, all of it recounted with real compassion in beautifully clear English. This multilingual immigrant needs no ghostwriter.
Unlike the collection of editorial essays which comprised "The Caged Virgin", "Infidel" is a consistently focused narrative of a spectacularly eventful life launched almost inadvertantly into an unparalleled adventure in moral courage. But there's far more here than a clash-of-cultures story well told. There is no targeted rush toward a predestined liberation. The revelatory discovery of western freedoms comes late in the book and gathers like a slow-motion sunrise. Only in the final chapters does she defect from Muslim culture, graduate from the University of Leiden, become a Dutch legislator, a target of Islamic terrorists, and an incendiary revolutionary for Muslim womens' rights.
More than simply discovering western libertarian values, she shows a deep and critical understanding of their history, how they've shaped the modern world, and shows their prognosis for dealing with the festering problem of Europe's Islamic subculture. Her extraordinary life seems more an ongoing work in progress than a settled iconographic career. She has recently moved to America--the adopted home of another famously eloquent and consequential revolutionary: Tom Paine.