This harrowing memoir provides an illuminating glimpse into the security apparatus of one of the world’s most repressive countries.
The elections of 2009 led to the largest street protests in Iran since the fall of the Shah, and the establishment responded by arresting and torturing thousands of the participants. With the assistance of Molloy (co-author: Jantsen’s Gift, 2009, etc.), Newsweek correspondent Bahari details his incarceration at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards in Teheran’s notorious Evin prison. Because both his father and sister spent years in Iranian prisons for their political activism, Bahari was better prepared for his ordeal than most people, but the reality was shocking even to him. He learned from his interrogator, a man he knew only as “Rosewater” due to his overpowering perfume, that the Islamic Republic believed he was an American spy and one of the chief instigators of the protests. The key piece of evidence against him was an interview he once gave to a correspondent from the Daily Show with John Stewart, who was dressed as a spy and who introduced him by saying, “He goes by the code name Pistachio.” Rosewater also presented him with the damning evidence of his membership in a Pauly Shore fan club on Facebook, and that he had traveled to New Jersey. Much of the book concerns the psychological impact of imprisonment and separation from loved ones, and Bahari draws upon the strength of his relatives to survive. While contemplating suicide, he imagined his father telling him, “You shouldn’t do their jobs for them. If they want to kill you, they can easily do it themselves.” Especially timely given recent events throughout the Middle East, this book is recommended for anyone wishing to better understand the workings of a police state.
Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6946-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
