A courageous account of a challenging life that ultimately becomes an exhausting read.
A woman forced to flee Iran with her family battles lifelong mental illness, racism, and sexual abuse in this debut memoir.
When Iran descended into violent revolution, debut author Majidi’s family, which had close ties to the shah, was compelled to escape to New Jersey. The clan was plunged into turmoil—her siblings turned angry and reckless, her mother sought comfort in alcohol, and her father plummeted into a deep depression. In addition to financial hardship—her family’s savings was marooned in Iran—Majidi also weathered social and cultural isolation. She scored some measure of solace in academic achievement in high school, but she was plagued by a pendulum swing between anxiety and depression and fell into an abusive relationship with a possessive 19-year-old man. She went to Barnard College and later earned an MFA in writing from the New School, discovering a love of literature and creative production. But she was repeatedly victimized by craven men and raped by two colleagues while she worked for Rolling Stone magazine. Majidi pressed charges, but she was never quite taken seriously by the authorities, and it became increasingly clear that justice would never be delivered. The author fell in love with her married writing instructor, James, and when he turned his back on her, she obsessively stalked him for years and sent him thousands of emails. She became engulfed by paranoid delusions, convinced her novel had been stolen for politically conspiratorial purposes and was somehow responsible for fomenting tumult in Iran and that her home was filled with poisonous gas. The author bravely explores three explosive issues—mental illness, racism, and misogyny—with bracing candor. In addition, she provides an engrossing and timely look at the way women of color are doubly objectified, as exotic sexual quarry and as individuals worthy of contempt. But her ambitious account should have been pared down considerably—Majidi buries readers under an accumulation of autobiographical facts that eventually turn into a cumbrous weight. Finally, readers be warned: This is not a story of inspiring redemption—it begins and ends with acid bitterness.
A courageous account of a challenging life that ultimately becomes an exhausting read.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973484-17-2
Page Count: 335
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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