An exceptional, emotionally blooded memoir of a young man's life in modern Iran—viewed from the perspective of his self- chosen exile. Milani (Social Sciences/Notre Dame College, Calif.), born to a well-off family in Tehran in 1948, was sent to the US at age 15 to be educated. He returned to a teaching job in 1975 only to be imprisoned under the shah's regime two years later. Milani departed for good in 1986, having suffered a broken marriage and physical symptoms of stress and depression that had everything to do with the country's climate of political ugliness. Any book chronicling those experiences would be interesting; that this one turns out to be a breathtaking example of the quiet, selfless gorgeousness of the memoirist's art is the reader's sheer good fortune. Milani offers classically ordered writing about character, place, and time. Contemporary Tehran is described as ``an overcrowded, densely polluted, dangerously stratified, economically hyped, architecturally schizoid, dust-ridden modern metropolis.'' The author's youth was ``contaminated with religion.'' Best are the descriptions of childhood—the psychologically complex parents behind the beards and veils; blackly comic musings about shortages of Ramadan pastries; circumcision at age 15 (``It's nothing,'' his friends tell him. ``They just cut off half your dool''). But the entire memoir is infused with the perversity, nightmarishness, and occasional strange sweetness of growing up amid religious rule and ritual. The book has a few flaws. Long excurses on Iranian politics veer off into abstractness, and the author seems unable to outgrow a certain coyness when writing about women (for whom, it must be said, he has an admirable regard). But this is a tale on whose every word readers will hang. Is exile—with its nuances of time, space, grief, loss, and the human comedy—the most reliable progenitor of literary beauty? This book would support that theory. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-934211-47-7
Page Count: 278
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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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