A timely, inspiring story of the triumph of the human spirit in the face of oppression.
Yaghoobi chronicles his experiences as a political prisoner in Iran from 1984 to 1989.
In 1979, an idealistic young graduate with a doctorate in genetics, the author returned to Iran to participate in “one of the largest popular revolutions in modern history.” He became active in a secular left-wing political organization. Five years later, he was arrested and held without trial, as part of a sweep against opposition groups that was organized by the Khomeini regime to consolidate its police-state power. Interrogated, tortured and kept in solitary confinement for months, Yaghoobi was terrified but managed to resist police efforts to force him to become an informer. Finally, he was moved in with other prisoners, into a situation in which prison authorities arbitrarily granted and removed privileges and living conditions were changed without warning as prisoners were shifted to different cell configurations and moved to different prisons. In response, the prisoners engaged in group resistance, even resorting to hunger strikes on occasion, and organized their communal-living situation, holding classes and sharing food and housekeeping tasks. Close friendships developed, and members of different political groups which opposed each other on the outside managed to collaborate while they were in prison. The situation, though difficult, remained tolerable until July 1988, when an armed rebellion broke out against the ruling regime. In reprisal, more than one-third of the political prisoners were summarily executed. A year later, Yaghoobi was finally released from prison and gained asylum in the United States. He remains a passionate human-rights advocate, but despite his desire to see regime change, he warns against efforts by foreign powers to impose changes on Iran.
A timely, inspiring story of the triumph of the human spirit in the face of oppression.Pub Date: April 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-61614-449-4
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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