An unsugared account that demonstrates the admirable, unbreakable bond of friends, parents and countrymen.
The three American hikers imprisoned in Iran in 2009 alternate relaying their versions of their scary, uncertain ordeal.
Trekking up a mountain in northern Iraqi Kurdistanm, the three 20-something Americans working in the Middle East as journalists and teachers wandered across the Iranian border and were thrown into prison, suspected of espionage. The two young men, friends Bauer and Fattal, were held for two years. Shourd, Bauer’s fiancee, was released after a year, and she employed her notoriety to get the others out. Indeed, they became convenient pawns in the ongoing political enmity between the United States and Iran, used to apply pressure where needed in discussing sanctions and nuclear arsenals. In their well-developed and detailed accounts, told in alternate first-person voices, the three remind the world how human, vulnerable and terribly isolated they were during their months of incarceration, when they knew little of what was going on in the outside world and existed day by day in an entrenched survival mode. Shuttled around blindfolded, with Shourd wearing hijab, they started several hunger strikes at first when the guards separated them and soon were transported to the dreaded Evin Prison in Tehran. Managing the guards was key, as was learning to stand up for themselves in terms of the small liberties they were allowed, such as spending a precious few hours together daily in the courtyard. Shourd endured solitary since she wasn’t allowed to mix with Iranians, while the two men roomed with each other and devised all kinds of mental-exercise games—e.g., studying Morse code and memorizing poetry. As a Jew, Fattal became more religiously observant in jail, and all three studied the Quran. All were critical of American government policy before their incarceration and emerged from their ordeal unbowed and outspoken.
An unsugared account that demonstrates the admirable, unbreakable bond of friends, parents and countrymen.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-547-98553-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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