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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Crammed with harrowing details, Hirsi Ali's account is a significant contribution to our times. [1 Dec 2006, p.1206]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
She delivers a powerful feminist critique of Islam informed by a genuine understanding of the religion. [18 Dec 2006]
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Outstanding
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The New York Times William Grimes
A brave, inspiring and beautifully written memoir. Narrated in clear, vigorous prose.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph Michael Burleigh
If there is one book that really addresses the existential issues of our civilisation, then Ali's autobiography is it. That it is brilliantly and soberly written is a bonus.
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Outstanding
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The Guardian Natasha Walter
For pure energy and readability, Ali's autobiography is the winner. She proves herself here a true writer, able to sum up a scene that may be completely foreign to the reader in a way that makes it a living, breathing experience, unforgettably raw and immediate.
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Outstanding
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Village Voice Joel Whitney
Hirsi Ali is a startling figure, blunt and brave, and her riveting memoir deserves a wide readership. Liberal readers may learn from her that the threat of Islamic terrorism is every bit as grave and real as the most vocal have claimed; conservatives may learn how not to make it worse. Everyone else gets a thrilling story.
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Outstanding
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Theodore Dalrymple
This is one of the most crucial documents of our time, and is absorbing and pleasurable to read.
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Eric Weinberger
It is hard sometimes to know why Hirsi Ali engenders such abuse. Of course, attacking Islam and the prophet Mohammed does not help; but her pronouncements are delivered only in the spirit of purest reason.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Mary Wakefield
It's been a week since I finished Ayaan Hirsi Ali's remarkable autobiography, and I haven't stopped thinking about it or talking about it for long. I'd recommend her story to anyone: man, woman, Muslim, Christian, Jew - because it drags some hideous truths out from the shadows, and because it shows that even the most hopeless life can be transformed by the right mix of chance and choice.
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Favorable
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Wall Street Journal Luuk van Middelaar
A lucid and captivating autobiography...Anecdotal and somewhat self-conscious, the book reads like a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel -- except that a Muslim girl from Mogadishu was never supposed to develop a sense of "self" in the first place. Infidel is less about fulfilling a destiny than about finding an identity.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Anne Applebaum
Hirsi Ali displays what surely must be her greatest gift: the talent for recalling, describing and honestly analyzing the precise state of her feelings at each stage of that journey.
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Sandip Roy
Infidel is not just a bitter manifesto against genital mutilation and holy terror. With her terrific ear for dialogue and her fine eye for detail, it's at times more like "Little Women" under the shade of the talal tree.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Book Review Ian Buruma
This uplifting story of liberation is entirely plausible, but it gives Hirsi Ali’s descriptions of life in the West an idealized, almost comic-book quality that sounds as naïve as those romantic novels she consumed as a young girl. Whereas the picture of Hirsi Ali’s childhood is full of nuance and variation, the images of the Netherlands could have been lifted from some patriotic Dutch children's book.
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Mixed
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Entertainment Weekly Hannah Tucker
Hirsi Ali sacrifices stylish prose in her scathing critique of Islam.
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Unfavorable
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The Independent Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
The world she knows does not include any enlightened Muslims. Islam puts all women into a cage, she claims. Not her own mother and grandmother though, obviously. Gross claims are brandished but not evidenced.
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Unfavorable
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The Economist
Read as a modern coming-of-age story set in Africa, the book has a certain charm. Read as a key to the thinking of a woman who aspires to be the Muslim Voltaire, it is more problematic. The facts as Ms Hirsi Ali tells them here do not fit well either with some of the stories she has told in the past or with her tendency in her political writing to ascribe most of the troubles of the Muslim world to Islam.
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