Algerian White

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…