As flat as a lavash. Stick with Marjane Satrapi and Azar Nafisi.
Ardalan, a senior producer at NPR’s Morning Edition, describes a life lived in two countries and two cultures.
This debut memoir should brim with narrative tension, but Ardalan is a plodding writer. Born in California, she grew up in Tehran. Her parents divorced, and her dad moved to Massachusetts with his new wife. Ardalan attended high school in Boston, and spent a brief spell in L.A. Then, in 1983, 18-year-old Ardalan went back to Iran and entered an arranged marriage. A return to the U.S. followed, then a divorce, a second marriage and a second divorce. Along the way, Ardalan went to college, landed a gig at NPR and raised four children. The central themes—negotiating two radically different cultures, moving from an adolescent faith to a mature engagement with religion, making it as a divorced woman in a subculture characterized by traditional gender arrangements, forging adult relationships with one’s parents—have potential. The insider’s view of religious life in revolutionary Iran is intriguing, and Ardalan’s loving descriptions of her extended family are charming. But Ardalan isn’t much of a wordsmith. Her prose is workmanlike and uninspired, riddled with clichés like, “I left Iran for America…and never looked back.” Her paeans to personal growth are downright hokey—“To give birth to myself, I had to continue in my devotion to moderation, balance, and harmony.” She glosses over fascinating questions, such as her first husband’s refusal to grant her an Iranian divorce, which means she can’t return to Iran without risking being claimed as her husband’s wife and forbidden to leave the country. And why didn’t her editor spare us Ardalan’s credulous ode, in the next-to-last-chapter, to the romantic happiness she has found with a new man?
As flat as a lavash. Stick with Marjane Satrapi and Azar Nafisi.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-8050-7920-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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