Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir

"Bhuttos very rarely, even then, died natural deaths," Bhutto writes, speaking of her great-great-grandfather. And so it seems in this family history lived on a stage of national and international intrigue. A grandfather, Zulifar Ali Bhutto, executed; an uncle, Shanawaz Bhutto, murdered; a father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, assassinated; and an aunt, Benazir Bhutto, assassinated; all inhabit this utterly fascinating blend of intimate but diligently researched family memoir and complex political history. The four decades from Fatima's grandfather's service as foreign minister in the 1960s to her aunt's assassination in 2007 encompass most of the history of Pakistan. Fatima covers its alliances, its wars, its coups, its treaties, its corruption, its inefficiency, its repression. The family's public political triumphs and tragedies are set within their private pleasures and painful quarrels—a life of power and a life in exile, falling in love and being imprisoned, the ease of wealth for happy childhoods and the anguish of adult separation so severe that Fatima holds her aunt Benazir culpable in her father's assassination. Partisan and controversial as aspects of it are, Fatima Bhutto's book is a lucid and engaging account of a nation and a family. (Oct.)