WORD LISTS

"I Am Malala" by Malala Yousafzai, Part Four–Epilogue

Thu Jul 23 11:07:13 EDT 2015
By Vocabulary.com (NY)Visual Thesaurus Moderator
An ordinary Pakistani girl is shot by the Taliban while fighting for her right to an education. Co-written with Patricia McCormick, in this memoir, Malala Yousafzai, the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, tells her story.

Here are links to our lists for the book: Prologue–Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four–Epilogue
wretched
I looked at my father’s wretched face, and I knew that he would honor my wishes no matter what I decided.
gala
I saw so many children suffering still — why should I be enjoying galas and ceremonies?
stench
The air was thick with the familiar smell of diesel, bread, and kebab mixed with the stench from the nearby stream, where everyone dumped trash.
chaplain
She told me that her name was Rehanah and that she was the Muslim chaplain. She began to pray in Urdu.
excruciating
Meanwhile, the bright lights in my room were excruciating, like hot white daggers to my eyes, especially my poor left eye, which wouldn’t close.
grimace
Dr. Fiona grimaced slightly.
fracture
When the bullet hit my temple, it fractured the bone, sending splinters of bone into the lining of my brain.
ordeal
Suddenly I saw that they had some gray hairs and wrinkles. Had they always had them? Or had this ordeal aged them somehow?
brink
Literally, a brink is "the edge of a steep place" or "a region marking a boundary." But the example sentence uses the noun in a figurative phrase to describe the dangerous condition between life and death. Ironically, because her life was on the brink, in order to save her, the doctors had to push her closer to death with a medically induced coma so that they could fly her to a better-equipped hospital on the other side of the world.
He had never doubted the rightness of our cause — but that cause had taken his daughter to the brink of death.
transpire
And yet, as my parents told me everything that had transpired while I was in a coma or in my windowless hospital room, it was almost as if they were telling me a story about someone else. It felt as if these things had happened to some other girl, not me.
devour
The Latin "vorare" means "to swallow" and another definition of "devour" is "eat greedily." But the example sentence's use of the verb shows that Malala is more of a voracious reader than eater. It supports one of the first images in the memoir, in which she leaves her breakfast half-eaten to rush off to school.
I was finally able to read again and devoured The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a book given to me by the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown.
flinch
Sometimes on those early outings, when I saw a man come toward me, I would flinch. If I let my imagination go wild, I could picture every man on the street hiding a gun, waiting to attack.
ironic
I was falling behind at school! How ironic. The girl who campaigned for girls’ education had lost the top spot in her class.
perplexed
My mother, who cannot speak English like the rest of us, wanders perplexed through the shops, inspecting the strange foods for sale.
humanitarian
I am making books, documentaries, and speeches, and I am meeting interesting people, doing social media campaigns, and engaging in humanitarian work.

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