NEW DELHI, May 5, (Agencies): Her striking looks recall her famous aunt, slain Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto, but Fatima Bhutto, who has penned a memoir of her family’s blood-soaked history, says the resemblance ends there.
Fatima is a fierce critic of her charismatic aunt, who twice served as prime minister, claiming she was power hungry and “morally responsible” for the murder of her own brother — the writer’s father — in 1996.
The book, “Songs of Blood and Sword”, is an adulatory — critics say airbrushed — portrayal of Fatima’s father,
Murtaza Bhutto, a rival to Benazir in Pakistan’s volatile, faction-ridden politics.
“It’s a book I always knew I would write” as a “journey of remembrance of my father,” Fatima told AFP in New Delhi where she was promoting her book.
Pakistan’s most famous political dynasty has been dogged by bloodshed since Fatima’s grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the nation’s first democratically elected leader, was hanged by the dictatorship of General  Zia-ul-Haq in 1979.
In each decade, “the Bhuttos seemed to lose another member” of the family, says Fatima, 28, who studied at Columbia University in New York, then did an MA at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Adored
She now lives at the longtime Bhutto family home in a plush suburb of Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial hub, with her adored stepmother Ghinwa Bhutto, who raised her after her parents split when she was a baby.
A precocious writer, she published a volume of poetry when she was just 15 — a year after her father was gunned down outside the same family home — and now is a newspaper columnist known for her outspokenness.
She recounts in the book how she hid in a windowless dressing room, clutching her young brother, when her father was shot dead in what she sees as a move to eliminate a rival to Benazir — who was then prime minister.
Benazir “certainly felt Pakistan was not big enough for two Bhuttos at that time,” said Fatima, who cites in her book a tribunal ruling that her father’s killing could not have happened without approval at the “highest level of government.”
Benazir blamed her brother’s death on a plot to destabilise her government.
She was herself killed in a suicide attack in 2007 after returning to Pakistan to contest elections following eight years of self-exile.
Fatima said she wrote the book as a “homage” to her father and also to redress what she sees as his distorted image in the public eye.
After Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed, Murtaza and his younger brother Shahnawaz formed a guerrilla outfit to revenge his death and overthrow Zia.
The group was blamed for shootings, bombings and the 1981 hijacking of a Pakistan International Airways plane. Their activities earned Murtaza a “terrorist” tag that his daughter maintains is unwarranted.
The book aims to break through the “mythology built around him” by opponents, says Fatima, who took six years “playing private detective” and tracking down her father’s friends.
Execution
Death runs through the length of her story, from her grandfather’s execution, the shooting of her father, the mysterious death of Shahnawaz — the Bhutto family believed he was poisoned — and Benazir’s assassination.
Despite her anger toward Benazir, Fatima also recalls the good times when she was a child and Benazir was her “favourite aunt” who read her bedtime stories and recollects they shared a taste for “disgusting sticky sweets.”
But when Benazir came to office as prime minister, “power transformed her and not for the good,” she says.
Fatima said she has survived “all this madness” because she had a “lucky source of strength in my (step)mother to help me move past the violence.”
A poised speaker who some believe could emerge as a politician in her own right, Fatima insists she harbours  no political ambitions and does not believe in “birthright” politics.
Her wish is to continue being a writer as she feels it allows her “a freer role to speak about issues from outside the system.”
But the feuds that have beset her family have percolated down into her own generation.
She and her two brothers have no contact with Benazir’s three children.
“That door was shut long ago,” she says.

As a New Yorker, Joseph Mackin was enormously affected by the 9/11 attacks so it seemed natural to focus on this event when he wrote and to combine another issue high up in the America psyche — plastic surgery.
In his debut novel, “Pretend All Your Life,” Mackin writes about a Park Avenue plastic surgeon and his life over six disastrous days in post 9/11 New York City. The surgeon’s son Bernardo, who worked in finance, died in the Twin Towers.
Mackin studied literature at New York Univerity, Yale and at the IEN in Barcelona, Spain, and also worked at The Paris Review but it took him some time before he felt he was ready to pick up a pen and write.
Mackin, who also works as an Internet consultant, spoke to Reuters about writing and his book:
Q: What got you interested in plastic surgery?
A: “I did some Internet consultancy for some plastic surgeons and I was fascinated by how people want to change the way they look to have their outside reflect their insides. After 9/11 it was the case that the insides of things were exposed — of people and how the world was — and in many cases the insides did not match what was previously thought.”
Q: Did you find attitudes to plastic surgery have changed?
A: “In the 1990s it seems plastic surgery was losing its taboo quality and people were no longer hiding it. It became more prevalent across the country and has grown every year for the past few decades as they continue to invent more procedures. One-third of patients now are men. Plastic surgery dropped off briefly after 9/11 but then it came right back. Liposuction is one of the ones that grew the most. I stood and watched a full face lift and liposuction to the neck and upper and lower eye lids during a four-hour procedure.”
Q: Were you in New York on 9/11?
A: “I was in Manhattan. I knew people who were killed. Everyone I knew was affected by it. It is still like that. As we have come around, with the new president and the wars, it receded a bit but it comes back fresh again and people look at it in a different light.”
Q: Was this the first novel you wrote?
A: “This is my second novel but my first public novel. The first novel I sort of lost in the middle. I was too ambitious in the concept but I am glad that I was, as I found what I needed to know to do better. Some young writers burst right out of the box ... but I needed to know more about the world in order to write this. What I knew at 22 I could not write this book.”
Q: How long did the book take?
A: “It took me about 18 months to write. After that I took some good advice from people and set it aside for a bit then revisited it and made some more changes.”
Q: Have you started your next book?
A: “Yes, I am writing a book about an elderly woman who loses her husband but decides one morning that she didn’t lose him but that he is still around. It’s called “Aubage”.

Former first lady Laura Bush kicked off a national book tour Tuesday in northern Virginia, cranking out nearly 10 autographs a minute as hundreds of fans waited hours for a five-second opportunity to say hello.
Fans began lining up shortly after 7 a.m. outside the Books-A-Million in McLean for the chance to buy an autographed copy of Bush’s new memoir, “Spoken from the Heart.”
Seated on a chair with gold-colored accents, Bush repeatedly thanked her many fans, who were thrilled to meet a woman they universally described as “a class act.”
“I will read anything the Bush family writes,” said Susan Miller, 64, of Arlington. “I’ve always admired Laura Bush and I can’t wait for her husband’s book to come out. I just think they’re a great team.” Former president George W. Bush’s memoir, “Decision Points,” is set to be released in November.
Kristina Okhotin, 21, of San Diego said she is a fan of the Bushes, but she debated whether to attend the signing. She finally decided an opportunity to meet a first lady was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“In real life, she looked a lot prettier,” Okhotin said.
Bush began signing books at noon and the line had cleared by about 1:30 p.m. Most of those waiting in line were women.

In the book she discusses her husband’s decision to stop drinking in the mid 1980s and describes him as “a bore” when he drank. She also writes about a fatal car accident she was involved in as a teenager growing up in Midland, Texas.
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey on her syndicated television show Tuesday, Bush said she still carries guilt from the crash, in which she ran a stop sign and struck and killed a high school friend.
“What I did was try not to think about it, put it out of my mind,” Bush told Winfrey.
As for the drinking, Bush told Winfrey it was part of the culture in Midland but that her husband decided after his 40th birthday to quit drinking, and did it cold turkey.
“I knew that George was drinking too much. ... He knew it, too,” Bush said.
The former first lady is also scheduled to appear at bookstores in Arlington and Washington on Thursday before heading to Dallas on Friday.

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