Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail

Rating:
Summary: Lost Interest
Review: I read 55 pages & found myself unable to "gel" with the main character or any of the characters. Perhaps, there was too little dialogue in the first 50 pages to get a real feel for the characters.

Rating:
Summary: super duper
Review: Annotation:
At first, Malika's story seems to be centered on pretty dresses, jewelry and the royal life as an adopted princess. She was adored and never wanted for anything. Eldest daughter of General Outfir and his wife, Malika grew up among royalty. That all came crashing down when her father is assassinated for planning a coup to overthrow King Hassan of Morrocco. Malika and her brothers and sisters and mother spent the next twenty years in jail

Author Bio:
Malika is an excellent story teller and has lives on the inside of the royal family in Morocco so it is very interesting to hear details of her upbringing. Malika Oufkir was a teenager in the prime of her life when she was put into horrible prison conditions for twenty years with her family.

Evaluation:
Horrifying, true story. This book is depressing, yet inspiring. This book is a story of human survival under conditions that are almost unimaginable. It's amazing that it happened not to long ago in a country we hear little about. This has to be one of the most moving books I've ever read. I highly recommend it.


Rating:
Summary: Stolen Life
Review: The eldest daughter of General Oufkir, Malika Oufkir, was born into a world of luxury and expensive clothing. The king of Morocco adopted her at age five, where she was to be raised with his daughter, the princess. Here she also lived in a luxurious palace, ate the finest foods and played with the best toys. It was only a few years later that her father was to participate in an attempt to assassinate the King and in result was captured and executed. The Oufkir family was also punished. The mother and five children, including Malika, were sent to an abandoned fort and desert prison to be imprisoned for twenty years. The only way her family was to survive was by will power, which is what they did. The descriptions of their lives in the confining walls of an almost unimaginable prison cell were breathtaking. For almost a decade they did not feel sunlight or taste any food that was appropriate to eat. At the mere age of three, the youngest brother of the Oufkir family tried to commit suicide. Malika's story was an unforgettable account of a woman who had a will to live her life and see her family do so as well. One can only imagine how millions of others' lives have been stolen and their stories not told. Stolen Lives is an attempt to do just that, Malika's stolen life should be read by all.

Rating:
Summary: Another mixed review
Review: This is a difficult book to write a review for, because even though I sympathize with the Oufkir family and cannot imagine what it must have been like for them, I came away from the story really disliking Malika, the author.

I have no doubt that she and her family suffered the atrocities she describes in the book, but I quickly became irritated with her, because she insists on portraying herself as the person who kept everyone together and sane, and every idea or plan they had (whether for escape or just for simple survival) came from her. It's almost as if, without her, the others surely would not have been able to deal. I became bored with the one-sidedness of the story, and I fully agree with other reviewers who said they would have liked to have had the others who were imprisoned with Malika tell their side of the story as well.

We don't get enough background on the father, General Oufkir, either. He worked for the king as one of his generals, then turned his back on him and plotted to kill him, so it's obvious he lived a rather...colorful life. I would have liked some info on the shady stuff he did for the king. Even though Malika was young at the time, I'm sure she probably could have dug up some of this information before writing the book. Maybe Malika didn't want to go into her father's wrongdoings, for fear that this would have made her less sympathetic, but I think it would have made her more sympathetic had she been a bit more straightforward about who her father really was and what his job entailed. Nothing in her book expresses regret over the fact that she lived a privileged lifestyle because her father worked for the king doing his dirty work. None of that is her fault, of course, and I still believe it was an incredible injustice to punish these innocent children for what their father did. I would just have liked a bit more honesty about it all.

All of this, however, does not take away from the fact that this is an amazing story about human resilience and the will to survive. These people were unfairly imprisoned and left to rot, yet they managed to come out of it alive. It is definitely a story that needs to be told, and a glaring example of how absolute power is never a good thing.


Rating:
Summary: Junk
Review: It is hard to be unsympathetic in your own book, but Ms. Oufkir manages!

Rating:
Summary: Difficult life but hard to empathize
Review: I initially liked this book, but had some reservations. I could not put my finger on it until recently and that's what persuaded me to write this review.

Initially, I found myself unable to seperate the forrest for the trees of my feelings about this family. One feels empathy for this family, but the real horror of this story is not how badly treated these women were, but how little concern they had for anyone but themselves. The whole book was solely about how badly they were treated in exile as compared to the life of luxury they had to start with. And then they complained how badly their former "freinds" treated them when they escaped. It may have been callous treatment, but what did ANY of members of this family do to relieve the suffering of anyone else when they had all the opportunity in the world? The answer is never. They were self indulgent, insulated and uncaring benificiaries of a corrupt regime until they themselves were at the mercy of this self-same regime. No tears were shed by me.

And that's why I have little sympathy for a family that betrayed their friends (her father via the coup) and who then were surprised that they were treated harshly after the fact. The women did not care their money came from the sweat off other's misery (the vast population of the country) and then were chargrined to find that no one was really willing to do anything to get them out.

Overall the book was decently written, but their plight really does not make me upset. Many others suffer worse indignities and nobody gives a damn. Millions can starve to death, some never knowing the feeling of a full stomach for one day in their lives, and we all read a book about a wealthy family reduced to poverty and imprisioned?

Because of the seemingly absurd riches to rags storyline, this is the only reason this book gets any attention. If you have ever lived in a third world country, outrages of much larger scale occur daily.

I finished the book feeling glad they survived their ordeal, but realized that I feel worse for the untold millions who never get a chance.