A uniquely rendered chronicle of one woman's personal and professional journey from faith to activism.
This poignant memoir by a French Iranian journalist in the form of a letter to her deceased grandfather recounts a deeply felt 10-year journey to immerse herself in what it means to be Iranian.
A year after her grandfather’s death in 1997, just when the reformist Mohammad Khatami had been elected to great hope and fanfare, Le Figaro Middle East correspondent Minoui (co-author: I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced, 2010), who was born in Paris to a French mother and Iranian father, landed in Tehran, hoping to learn more about her heritage. For the next 10 years, she stayed on and off with her surviving grandmother and traveled around the country, interviewing people of different classes and political beliefs and learning about the violent vagaries of Iranian politics. At first, with the election of Khatami, the hope among citizens under age 25 was palpable; after enduring decades of Islamic oppression after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the people’s mood was wildly optimistic and confident. In spite of the widespread influence of the “morality police,” the youth daringly held mixed, alcohol-fueled parties behind closed doors, openly protested, and supported a vibrant “reformist press.” Yet soon enough, Minoui became aware of the dark underside of Iranian society and institutions that would soon turn ugly and menacing—e.g., the appearance of intelligence agents who tracked her movements and interrogated her threateningly and the prowling of radical rightist militiamen, one of whom Minoui befriended to figure out how they think. Ultimately, as the author writes in one of many moments of pointed insight, “to research your country’s history was to uncover your own story, too,” and she learned intimately of her grandfather’s tangled past. With the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “a veritable machine to crush modern Iran had been set in motion,” and she left the country in 2009.
A uniquely rendered chronicle of one woman's personal and professional journey from faith to activism.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-17522-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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