Stylistically clunky and excessively detailed, but still a rare, rich glimpse inside a closed society.
Frank, somewhat scattershot account by California-born journalist Moaveni (Lipstick Jihad, 2005) of life under Iran’s repressive regime.
In Tehran in the spring of 2005, sent by Time magazine to evaluate young people’s sense of their future on the eve of the Iranian presidential election, Moaveni, who then resided in Beirut, was also testing the waters to see if she wanted to move to Iran permanently. She was charmed by the feeling of thaw that permeated Tehran, the laxness about enforcing dress codes and the yearning for an open society run by a secular government. But the apathy about voting by this generation of Iranians, who cared more about securing material goods than about revolution or civil liberties, enabled the sudden, alarming ascent of fundamentalist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the figurehead of an increasingly repressive theocracy. Despite such warning signs over the next two years as the arbitrary police destruction of satellite dishes and Internet censorship, Moaveni stayed, largely because she fell in love with a divorced businessman and became pregnant. (The couple’s hasty decision to get married was prompted by fear of “the morality police.”) She was required to meet regularly with a government minder to whom she had to reveal her journalistic projects and sources. “Mr. X” grew increasingly menacing, and the author was essentially cowed from talking to anyone or writing about injustice. Moaveni made peace with her decision “to put safety above the story,” she writes, though she admires those like her friend Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who risked imprisonment and worse. Blessed with wealthy, influential relatives in a country where connections are everything, the author’s self-proclaimed naiveté is frequently appalling, though it certainly underscores the apolitical nature of a younger generation that dreams primarily of personal freedom from the Islamic regime.
Stylistically clunky and excessively detailed, but still a rare, rich glimpse inside a closed society.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6645-2
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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