A well-written primer on the Iranian protests responding to the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022.
An international team of authors provide analysis of Iran’s 2022–2023 protest movement in this anthology of essays.
“Dedicated to those who sacrificed for a free and democratic future for the Iranian people,”[vi] this book assembles an impressive panel of diplomats and scholars who offer insights into the Iranian protest movement that followed the 2022 murder of 23-year-old Mahsa Amini while she was in jail for not wearing a hijab “properly.” Many of the chapters center on the role of women, who “have been at the forefront of the struggle for democracy in their country,” per contributor Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian senator. Published by the International Committee in Search of Justice, a Brussels-based lobby that opposes Iran’s Islamic Republic, many of the book’s contributors are former diplomats or politicians who favor a more robust Western response to Iran, including ISJ’s president Alejo Vidal Quadras (former vice president of the European Parliament), J. Kenneth Blackwell (former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights), and Robert Torricelli (a former U.S. senator from New Jersey). These views are supplemented by more scholarly perspectives offered by university professors Behrouz Pouyan and Ivan Sascha Sheehan. While each author’s chapter focuses on a specific aspect of the protest movement (from the Islamic Republic’s repressive strategies to the tactics and unified spirit of activists), all emphasize the bravery of the revolutionary movement’s participants against a brutal regime. The book also calls for a more active response from the international community that goes “beyond expressing statements of condemnation of the regime” or merely denoting “sympathy with the Iranian people,” but that also includes concrete action, such as the closing of Iranian embassies throughout Europe. At less than 80 pages, this is a solid introduction to the contemporary protest movement in Iran that packs in-depth analysis and contextualization of a complex nation into a concise work. Though political, its analysis rarely comes across as propagandistic, instead presenting nuanced commentary that effectively makes the case that “the world will be a better place when Iran is free.”
A well-written primer on the Iranian protests responding to the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-9464752205
Page Count: 90
Publisher: International Committee in Search of Justice
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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