Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir [Hardcover]

Fatima Bhutto is a young , beautiful and opinionated pakistani columnist who also happens to be the niece of Benazir Bhutto , twice the prime minister of Pakistan and eventually assaninated during a campaign rally back in 2007 . She has just released a very uneven book about her father , Murtaza Bhutto who was gunned down under mysterious circumanstances back in 1996 outside his home in Karachi.
The book itself is indeed " a love letter " to her father , as the writter herself has said in an interview and a hateful letter to her late aunt for whom she finds flaws to point out even while Benazir was still a teenager .
Fatima's world seems to be strictly split between the good guys ( her father , his friends and allies , her grandfather and strangely enough the chinese and Hafez al Assad's Syria ) and the bad guys ( mainly Benazir Bhutto and the americans ) . Murtaza Bhutto is presented here as the perfect man , the perfect politician , the perfect father , the perfect husband and even the perfect boyfriend in the case of Della Garoufalis , a woman married to a jailed general of the failed greek junta. " I had to understand why he went to Kabul . It was a decision which changed our lifes " writes Fatima but never is she willing to question anything about her father's actions , even his decision to take up arms .
I have not lived in Pakistan so i don't know which Bhutto had more influence to the pakistani people or was more righteous or honest but having read many interviews of all of them on the web and seen speeches of theirs on youtube , i can say all three public figures of the family ( Benazir , Murtaza and their father Zulfiqar ) seemed to excel in a typical populist rhetoric which promises much more than can be delivered .
The best parts of the book is when Fatima talks about her own thoughts and feelings and comments on the present .The final two chapters of her book are haunting , the epilogue just beautiful . As a political analysis of her country's past though , it feels too one-sided .
The last few years , Pakistan is constantly making the news for all the wrong reasons and i feel it needs people exactly like her , bright and brave , to speak out and introduce to the world the pakistani point of view of things . A great book by her is only a matter of time .

One of the best books I've read in quite a some time. A great read - fascinating and heart whelming.

Fatima Bhutto gives a coruscating account of the recent history of Pakistan and the major role of the Bhuttos within it. Driven by the murder of her beloved father Mir Murtaza she tells about the first democratically elected Prime Minister in Pakistan , her Grandfather Zulfikar Al Bhutto . Zulfikar was deposed during his first term by a General of the Army Zia and later executed. Zulfikars sons, Mir Murtaza and Shahnawaz left for exile to ferment an armed revolution in response. After Zia was killed in airplane crash Benzaire Bhutto positioned herself to become the first female Asian prime minister. In what should have been a restoration of democracy and human rights instead became decent into corruption political violence and autocracy that included a bitter and ultimately lethal persecution of her brother Mir Murtaza. Fatima is candid especially about the faults of her Grandfather as prime minister, the political prisoners and the beginnings of the erosion of women rights and dictatorship of Zia and inexplicably the deeper corruption and political violence meted out under Benzaire's rule. This is a tremendous book of courage where she has managed to present the facts as an outside champion for liberty as her father was but also an insider in this complex political dynasty. It is painful to read her as she describes her aunt Benzaire's life and death. The complexity of the emotion as another Bhutto is killed and her persecutor is removed. There are only moments when I felt her own self criticism of naivety and hagiography were true. She doesn't see the extent that all the Bhuttos were feted by the west. All the Bhuttos winning scholarships to Harvard and Oxford on merit doesn't seem credible. Her uncle's death Shahnawaz by suicide is not reasonably in question. A thunderous family row, drink and accessible poison make this by far the likely explanation. She also underestimates the brutalization of Benzaire in Pakistan while the brothers were posturing as revolutionaries. What happens to the brutalised is they become brutalizes in turn. This doesn't excuse but explains to an extent the creature Benzaire became. Her father's decision to apparently shoulder the opposition to Benzaire/Zinardi rule appeared to be ill advised. These small caveats aside this is an important well told story that needed to be told. I was tempted to read Benazaire's Daughter of the East autobiography again but this is enough time for one family and I think Fatima would agree.