Both a gripping personal story and an insightful historical-cultural study.
Copeland (editor: A Wonderful Life: 50 Eulogies to Lift the Spirit, 2006, etc.) explores the mystery surrounding his father’s controversial persecution in revolutionary-era Iran.
The author attempts to reclaim his family’s pre-revolutionary past and uncover the mysterious life and death of his father, American Max Copeland, who was married to (and eventually represented by) the first female lawyer of the Islamic Republic. “I would come to understand that I am the by-product of the two most ethnocentric cultures on the face of the earth,” Copeland writes. “Cultures tend to perceive the world through their own unique lenses, of course, but Iran and America are fairly exceptional in this regard.” In a narrative that alternates among the differing perspectives of his father, his mother, Shahin, and himself, Copeland paints a lucid portrait of chaotic late-1970s Tehran, the last days of the shah’s reign and the beginnings of a repressive Islamic state. During the early days of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Copeland’s father was caught illegally selling radar equipment for Westinghouse, which, like most other Western-run companies, was shutting down and liquidating their Iranian assets subsequent to the Islamic takeover in 1979. Max was accused of spying for the CIA and was tried in an Islamic court for trading with the enemy, among other things. Having no way to defend himself in the courtroom, Shahin was permitted to take up his case in court. Although Copeland doesn’t solve any big mysteries surrounding his father’s life and alleged connections to the CIA, he does concoct an engaging narrative, however fragmented, that highlights his family’s resilience in the face of challenging, unforeseen political circumstances. Along the way, the author’s personal immersion in his family’s history helps him come to terms with his Iranian heritage and allows him to build a much-needed figurative bridge between two very different but equally misunderstood cultures.
Both a gripping personal story and an insightful historical-cultural study.Pub Date: March 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-15850-6
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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
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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