Hisham Matar, an American born British-Libyan author, is an acclaimed novelist and essayist. The Return—Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, is a memoir about his 2012 return to Libya and attempt to come to terms with the unfathomable loss of his father, Jaballa Matar.
Jaballa Matar was a wealthy Libyan, having made a small
“I was told to come alone. I was not to carry any identification and would have to leave my cell phone, audio recorder, watch, and purse at my hotel in Antakya, Turkey.” These were the conditions under which Souad Mekhennet, an investigative journalist at the time for the Washington Post, met with Abu Yusak, the
Memoirs can be great or awful. Sometimes a memoir is nothing more than an author’s musings about some specific event in his or her life, with little to offer the reader beyond the author’s singular self-absorbed experience. Too much “me” and very little “why should I care?” That said, I have just read the second
I know I said I was a fiction fanatic, but when I read good nonfiction I just want to tell the world about it. So let me tell you about “H Is For Hawk”.
Helen Macdonald’s “H Is For Hawk” is a beautifully written and thoughtful book that includes patience as one of its many