A touching tribute to a former national hero—the author's father—and a homeland riven by contradictions.
Mournfully lyrical account of an evanescent privileged childhood on the eve of the Iranian Revolution.
The son of an eminent general in the Imperial Iranian Air Force, Minu-Sepehr enjoyed a charmed childhood at the Iranian base of Isfahan and then briefly in Tehran, where the family moved after the fall of the shah in 1979. In this beautifully composed memoir of a vanished time, the author, now a teacher in Oregon and the founder of the Forum for Middle East Awareness, reconstructs the increasingly fraught last days before his family was forced to flee their homeland, finding refuge in London and then America. While his indefatigable, proud father, “Baba,” kept an eye on the Soviets, Minu-Sepehr enjoyed tormenting the servants, learning to drive, navigating both the old-world ways and the modern ones of his grandmothers and mother, learning about Western culture from the Americans living on the base and hanging out in the kitchen with his beloved nanny, Bubbi, who included the boy in the lives of the lower classes he normally would never know. “They were taught to be invisible,” he writes of these fascinating low-ranking laborers, “to blow in and out with a tea tray…I loved every second of their utterances.” When the author was in fifth grade, the ugly political events began to intrude on his life. Baba’s colleagues and friends were killed, their pictures splashed across the newspapers; rumors of corruption and heresy abounded; the TV broadcasted the torching of Cinema Rex and the corruption trials. While the author’s older brother was sent off to boarding school in America, the family moved to their grandmother’s house in Tehran, where Minu-Sepehr attended a tougher Iranian school and learned, for the first time, a “political hierarchy.” Soon after, the family was able to get out, but always expecting to return—never to happen.
A touching tribute to a former national hero—the author's father—and a homeland riven by contradictions.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5218-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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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