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babewiththepower.bsky.social · @babewiththepower.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban 8/10

I think most people who would pick up this novel generally know who is Malala Yousafzai. It's there in the subtitle. As I usually do with books I'm starting, I glance over the top few Goodreads reviews and I was puzzled by what they said because they were complaining, according to them, about wanting it to cover more of what she did in the book. Having finished the memoir, I'm not sure what they read. I do think this book was written with westerners in mind, people who are fairly oblivious or ignorant about the history of colonization and war in the part of the world where she's from. I count myself among that, so I really appreciated the broadbrush coverage of history during her childhood. I think it was important to get context for her fight!<br/><br/>It is a memoir and most of her childhood was not only growing up in an environment many of us can't even imagine as commonplace, but as someone who is reviled for her gender and her fight against the walls with which a minority group of backward people tried to box her. What she did, which those reviews seemed to have missed, was exist. Exist as she was while giving in as little as possible to the constraints they tried to put on her as a girl. People like those responsible for threatening her and her family's life abhor educated people in general, but especially educated girls and women. Not everyone is strong enough or clear-eyed enough to stand up to that at any cost, to say, no, I am as worthy as any man of living my life as I choose. Kudos, of course, to her parents who raised her with these values and even as she was on death's door they agreed if she died it was no fault of hers or theirs for their activism demanding equality.<br/><br/>One other thing I thought of increasingly as I neared the dreaded time you know is coming, is how much the way things were going in Pakistan in many ways parallel where they've been going in the U.S. for the last decade. The increasing anger and escalating violence from an increasingly smaller and yet simultaneously more powerful minority, imposing their skewed religious views on everyone else. People terrorizing those who don't adhere to their ignorant ways and bending the government for the whole country to their will while only controling a part of the country through their illegal machinations. It's the same horrible thing men do in every empire, over and over. Sometimes people manage to avoid war, but most of the time not. I hope for more people like the inspiring Malala Yousafzai in this world to keep the peace. Now I must find out more of what she's accomplished in the 9-10 years since!

#book

Published 2026-08-18 17:59 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere