In Algerian White, Assia Djebar gives a chilling firsthand account of religious extremism and intellectual persecution in her native Algeria. She recounts the lives of three of her friends -- a psychiatrist, a sociologist, and a playwright -- who were killed in the aftermath of the 1956 struggle for independence. But Djebar will not allow her friends to be silenced. Her powerful memoir grows from conversations remembered and imagined with these fallen comrades and reflects on the horrors of war and exile. This is a chilling first-hand account of the religious extremism and intellectual persecution that plagues the author's homeland. A hymn to friendship and the enduring power of language, ... also a requiem for a nation's unfinished literature.
-- The New York Times
