A funny and occasionally insightful memoir of an Iranian-American comedian finding a voice in showbiz.
The struggles and successes of "the Persian Eddie Murphy.”
Iranian-American comedian, actor and first-time author Jobrani tells a fish-out-of-water story, all the while maintaining a self-deprecating tone—e.g., regarding immigrant parents: “I don’t think immigrant parents really understand the ratings system. They think that PG…means that a movie will give ‘parental guidance’ to your kid while you go shopping for gold jewelry, chandeliers, and marble counters at the mall." The author also recounts his desire to blend in and be seen as just another rich kid in Northern California, albeit one whose "loud and brown" father picked him up from soccer practice in a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow. Cultural typecasting followed Jobrani throughout his fledgling Hollywood career, perhaps most shockingly when he caught his big break at the renowned Comedy Store in Los Angeles in 1999 and was asked to dress in “Middle Eastern garb,” like “the Persian equivalent of blackface.” The author hits his stride with his chronicle of the period after 9/11, when he went on the offensive with his comedy, sharing his political views and observations in his stand-up act and on cable TV specials. Jobrani embraced the role of comedy in healing after 9/11 and, later, with two other comics on the international Axis of Evil Comedy Tour. This mission and his tales from the road comprise the bulk of the book. Jobrani believes it is his duty to bring these issues to light in a humorous, accessible way—e.g., when he quips that he is not involved in jihad, explaining he "lost interest altogether once [jihadis] started putting bombs in their underwear.” He also offers this practical advice: “Don't Wear A Backpack At Home Depot.”
A funny and occasionally insightful memoir of an Iranian-American comedian finding a voice in showbiz.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1476749983
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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
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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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