A welcome, illuminating peak behind the 21st century’s equivalent of the Iron Curtain.
An Anglo-French journalist married to an Iranian woman attempts to reconcile the joys of his adopted land with its grim cruelty.
Journalist de Bellaigue, who has written about the Middle East and South Asia for The Economist, The New York Review of Books and other highbrow publications, here turns his eye on the nation he’s called home for the past five years: the Islamic Republic of Iran. The author states that he wants to show readers the heart of a country whose people are friendly and lead a rich cultural life, yet also believe—sometimes fanatically—in a religion that glorifies death. And for the most part he accomplishes this goal, giving us a rare glimpse into a world most Westerners would consider bizarre. An Islamic seminarian, for example, steers clear of using his free time at night to memorize incantations, fearing that he will begin to repeat them ceaselessly and go insane. But the same man trusts himself enough to flirt with evil and wonder about the taste of wine, a forbidden indulgence under Koranic law. Such examples can feel like trees in a forest as we plow through episode after episode of exotic Iranian life: athletic clubs with homoerotic overtones, testimonials from soldiers who endured Saddam Hussein’s gas attacks, a female activist seeking to avenge the murders of her politically dissident parents. De Bellaigue employs literary devices in his narrative to sometimes powerful effect, as when he describes the way Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution has died but still reverberates through the capital: “Living in Tehran is like listening to the sea in a shell.” At other times—for example, when he adopts the first-person voice of a soldier fighting in the Iran-Iraq war—the conceits seem too gimmicky. Never tiresome, however, are his stellar passages on the Iranian side of still-fresh history, including the Iran-Contra scandal. Many of the Iranians involved were executed for dealing with infidels.
A welcome, illuminating peak behind the 21st century’s equivalent of the Iron Curtain.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-620980-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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