When Azad, the narrator of My Father's Rifle, goes from telling the reader "I was still a child" - as he does repeatedly in the early parts of the book - to "I was no longer a child," the shift is imperceptible. Looking back on the book, there is no one specific point that can be pointed to as the moment of transition. What the reader is given instead is a straightforward, unadorned look at the forces that shape life in a country where no quarter is given for anything – not belief, not language, and not enough breathing room to put together any effective resistance.

My Father's Rifle is a biographical account of boyhood in Kurdistan, and of the Kurdish struggle against Saddam Hussein, so we know at the outset how successful the resistance will eventually be. One gets a sense from the writing that Saleem (the author's name is Hiner Saleem; the narrator is named Azad Shero Selim), all grown up, wants the reader to see that as a child he felt revolution was possible; felt that it was, but knew that it wasn't. The pride he felt with his father being General Barzini's morse code operator is clearly so innocent, even when the details of the truth are clear – trying to repair a broken, possibly sabotaged Morse code machine, he is ultimately frustrated and when a prisoner fixes it for him, he jumps in and pretends it was his success. Azad sees the truth, but does not tell, and the fact that he does not tell is touched on so briefly that the reader gets a sense that even as an adult, Saleem wants to preserve that innocence and optimism that was only skin deep. Swimming alone in a river as a child when a plane flies overhead, dropping napalm bombs into the river that send towers of water into the sky around him as he tries to get to his family on the shore - that sort of experience either leads to shutting down or to blind optimism.

Saleem tells his story with measured, even writing that doesn't reduce that child's optimism and spreads the undoing of that optimism from the first page to the last. You start with his hope and by the end, you realize that whatever hope is left is more grounded in realism, and you don't know where the change happened - or if it wasn't really that way from the start. Saleem has given us a gift, a clear, non-dogmatic look at his own rites of passage into manhood, into the life of peshmergas- "he who looks death straight in the face," over and over again. The victories against the Baathist regime related here are small; the book itself, however, is a victory unachievable by men with guns.