I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

Even if you’ve seen her interviews and speeches, Malala's book is a timeline and unique perspective into Pakistan during the rising Taliban insurgency. She covers a lot about Pashtun and Islamic culture while telling her story.

I didn’t know just how politically active Malala was growing up, or what a badass her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, is. They’re both so intelligent and hardworking in the face of countless setbacks, from the insurgency and their society. You really feel for Malala when she says things like "I am very proud to be a Pashtun, but sometimes I think our code of conduct has a lot to answer for, particularly where the treatment of women is concerned.”

A passage from Malala talking with her aunt: "One day, I want to cross the sea", I said. "What is she saying?", asked my aunt, as if I was talking about something impossible. I was still trying to get my head around the fact that she had been living in the seaside city of Karachi for 30 years, and yet had never actually laid eyes on the ocean. Her husband would not take her to the beach. And even if she had somehow slipped out of the house, she would not have been able to follow the signs to the sea, because she could not read.

Ziauddin Yousafzai's TED talk

In I Am Malala readers will begin to understand rural Pashtun life in Pakistan, some ways that Taliban operatives seize control of local government, and the detrimental effects of Taliban authority on the freedom and expression of women. On the surface, the publisher bills this book as a memoir. But I would argue that it is half memoir and half a narrative history of the Swat Valley during the post-9/11 years.

I think the publisher's rushed this book into publication given Malala's prominence in Western media a couple of years ago. The first third of the book is a disjointed narrative that transitions between Malala explaining her childhood in the Swat Valley and extensive histories of twentieth-century Pakistani politics and the rise of the Taliban. Even when Malala's voice begins to come through in these chapters, her prose is very jumbled. Often two sentences will have no logical flow, and thus there are many seeming non-sequitur throughout.

Malala's voice becomes more distinct in the closing third of the book as she describes her educational experiences, her notable climb in Pakistani politics as a spokeswoman for women's educational rights, the assassination attempt that nearly took her life, and her long convalescence in Birmingham, England.

I'd recommend this book, but caution readers that the first roughly 100-120 pages will be tedious.

Unless you live under a rock you probably remember hearing about Malala, the young Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for speaking out about the rights of girls to go to school. However, the media didn't give a lot of background nor a lot of follow up and unless you were looking out for it, you might not know much more about that. This is the biography of Malala from childhood till her recovery from the shooting. It's in five parts: her childhood in the Swat Valley of Pakistan; the slow and subtle takeover of the region by the Taliban; the problems once the Taliban was in full power; the shooting itself; and her recovery in the UK afterwards.

Malala's explanation of the history and politics in the area is a great overview for those not familiar with the details, and her description of the way the Taliban slowly moved in and acquired support and power is chilling. It reminds me of some of the WWII histories I've read which describes the way the Nazi party slowly and methodically took control, and it's frightening to see how easy it was for the Taliban to take advantage of circumstances and an ineffective government. It also touches on some of the decisions the US made that damaged US-Pakistan relations, and how hostile they looked to the Pakistani people.

In the Audible version, Malala herself reads the introduction, and they chose a narrator with a similar accent that works very well for the book.

I would recommend this book to anyone; it's very worthwhile seeing the world through a completely different perspective and learning more about the world events that are otherwise just a few days of headlines on the news networks.