No Comparison

Jonathan Kay says that Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new memoir, Nomad (she was in town the other day to publicize it) "reads at times like a Mommie Dearest for the post-9/11 age." But as her book records, Hirsi Ali, who famously escaped her life of Koranically-decreed subservience (detailed in her earlier memoir, Infidel), had a lot more to contend with than a high-strung Hollywood movie godess who had an admittedly overwrought aversion to the sight of wire hangers:

The world Ms. Ali depicts is cruel and profoundly unattractive. But there is something captivating and noble about her refusal to indulge in the usual sentimental immigrant-memoir reveries -- the ones is which mother and daughter bond over the kitchen stove, learning gentle, timeless, saffron-scented life lessons. It takes a brutally candid author such as Ms. Ali to recognize that many immigrant mothers don't have any lessons to teach because they are products of broken cultures that have nothing to offer. What kind of romantic homage can be paid to sisterly solidarity when it was Ms. Ali's own grandmother who insisted-- over the father's objections -- that the author's genitals be mutilated according to local tradition?

I'm sure Ali would have far prefered Christina Crawford's  pampered life with mother Joan, hyperventilated theatrics and all, to the life she had with Grannie Dearest. (At least her genitals would now be intact.)