LONDON – A year ago, Malala Yousafzai was a 15-year-old schoolgirl in northwest Pakistan, thinking about calculus and chemistry, Justin Bieber songs and "Twilight" movies.
Today she's the world-famous survivor of a Taliban assassination attempt, an activist for girls' education — and a contender to win the Nobel Peace Prize this week.
It's easy to forget she is still a teenager and now a long way from home. The memoir "I Am Malala" goes some way toward redressing that balance. Published around the world on Tuesday, the book reveals a girl who worries about her clothes and her hair, but also has an iron determination that comes from experience beyond her 16 years.
The book, written with the British journalist Christina Lamb, recounts Malala's life before and after the moment on Oct. 9, 2012, when a gunman boarded a school bus full of girls in Pakistan's Swat Valley and asked "Who is Malala?" Then he shot her in the head.
The shooting is described briefly but vividly in the book.
"The air smelt of diesel, bread and kebab mixed with the stink from the stream where people still dumped their rubbish," Malala remembers. One of her friends tells her later that the gunman's hand shook as he fired.
Around that pivotal event, the book weaves Malala's story into the broader tale of her home region of Swat, a remote, mountainous region near the Afghan border.
Into this valley, in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, came the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban. The book describes their arrival — preaching against girls' education, shutting down DVD sellers and displaying the bodies of people they've executed. They blew up the region's ancient Buddha statues, and then they began blowing up schools. "They destroyed everything old and brought nothing new," Malala writes.
