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 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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