By Michiko Kakutani | International Herald Tribune | Published: February 19, 2008
328 pages. $27.95. HarperCollins.
Benazir Bhutto called her 1989 autobiography "Daughter of Destiny," and when she was assassinated in December at 54, she became the fourth member of her immediate family to die violently against the backdrop of Pakistani intrigue and politics: her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in 1979 on charges of having ordered the murder of a minor political opponent; her younger brother, Shahnawaz, mysteriously died of poisoning in 1985; and her other brother, Murtaza, was gunned down outside his home in 1996.
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Kamila Shamsie | The Guardian | Saturday February 16, 2008
336pp, Simon & Schuster, £17.99
There can be few experiences more disquieting than that of reading the opening pages of Benazir Bhutto's Reconciliation, with its description of her homecoming on October 18 2007 - the jubilation followed by carnage. The details of the suicide attack are horrific enough within their own context, but when read as precursor to the attack that killed Bhutto 10 weeks later they acquire an even more chilling resonance. There is the sense of reading two texts: the first might well have been published during the early months of Bhutto's premiership, its words a yardstick against which we would measure the effectiveness of her government; the second stands as the final testament of an extraordinary woman whose death added urgency to the already-urgent arguments of the book.
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