Passionate and commanding.
A frightening memoir of growing up under Iran’s male-dominated oppressors, confirming that the mad ayatollahs have, in 27 years, wrecked a once-vibrant nation and destroyed its culture.
Omid’s Iran is a dysfunctional society in a “coma of ignorance,” led by “mindless fanatics.” Males are obsessed with money and hymens. Women, if they aren’t victims, have sold out and joined the Pasdar spies who hound female violators of the ayatollahs’ decrees. Throughout, Omid displays numerous perceptive, valuable observations: Ayatollah Khomeini’s command of Farsi was so weak he could barely be understood; his mullahs took the Shah’s palaces after the overthrow, then cornered the black market for food to become “even richer” than the Shah; 70 percent of Iran’s villages have been destroyed or abandoned under the mullahs. She also harbors no illusions about Iran’s wickedness: “If Iran becomes a nuclear power,” she warns, “the world should start digging, either their shelters or their graves...” What is most riveting, however, is her striking journal of personal pain within her abusive family–her brother forced her into persistent incest, her wealthy father humiliated her and abandoned the family to destitution and she was forced to battle her way out of one arranged engagement after another. Little wonder she has emerged on the far side, in Vancouver, as a brittle manic-depressive finding it difficult to outrun her past. Omid wrote most of Living in Hell in a single month while under a therapist’s care, imbuing the work with a powerful sense of urgency.
Passionate and commanding.Pub Date: July 30, 2005
ISBN: 0-9759683-0-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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