Navai offers sharply rendered portraits of the bleak situation but does not provide much reason why she, and others she...
A daring exposé of what really goes on under the noses of the morality police in this God-fearing city of 12 million.
Many of these portraits of mostly contemporary Tehranis struggling against their country’s obsession with vice, public morality and political correctness are composite sketches. As such, British-Iranian journalist Navai protects the real identities of her subjects, who are as engaging as characters of fiction and reveal, frankly, the charade that living under Sharia law has become since Iran’s Islamic Revolution. “Let’s get one thing straight: in order to live in Tehran you have to lie,” writes the author in the opening. “Morals don’t come into it: lying in Tehran is about survival.” A brainwashed young member of the Western-backed terrorist group Mojahedin-e-Khalq (“Warriors of the People”) returned to the city of his youth after 20 years in America in order to assassinate Tehran’s former police chief; his plan resulted in devastating failure. A serious schoolgirl was encouraged by her parents to marry her charming older cousin, even though everyone knew he was a lazy philanderer. A young political activist was stalked by the judge who convicted his parents to hang in 1988; 15 years later, the judge desperately sought forgiveness and helped warn the activist that the Ministry of Intelligence was watching him. A prostitute turned to the more lucrative business of making porn movies, which were so popular in the Islamic state that she was duly exposed, imprisoned and hanged. Alcohol-running gangsters, martyrs, women arrested in belly-dancing class at the health club, a 13-year-old sold by her parents to a man in his 60s: These make up a deeply class-riven society in which sex is a rebellion and traditional values are circumvented at all costs.
Navai offers sharply rendered portraits of the bleak situation but does not provide much reason why she, and others she portrays, would ever want to return to Tehran.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-519-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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