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AN IRANIAN ODYSSEY

Name: AN IRANIAN ODYSSEY
Author: Gohar Kordi
ISBN: 1-85242-213-0

by Gohar Kordi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1993

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A searing memoir of growing up blind, as Kordi, born in Iran, recalls with quiet but heartfelt passion the devastating hardships she surmounted to become one of the first women graduates of the University of Tehran. Born into a peasant family, Kordi, now married and a mother, lost her sight at the age of four as the result of an infection for which she wasn't properly treated—because she was a girl. Her parents, an ill-matched couple (her father was a Turk, her mother a Kurd), didn't get along, which only aggravated the family's already difficult life. Food was always short, and what little money there was came from weaving carpets and taking care of the landlord's herds. In a society that despised women, Kordi was already at a disadvantage: Her mother neglected her; and when, hoping to find work, the family moved to the slums of Tehran, Kordi was made to sit on the sidewalk and beg. Frustrated and angered by her family's cruel treatment—only her father showed some tenderness—Kordi despaired of escaping what seemed an increasingly doomed situation. But she was a child of remarkable intelligence and initiative, and, persuading a neighbor to write to a popular radio show that dealt with people's problems, she began slowly to climb out of poverty and the intellectual isolation her blindness had imposed. Accepted at a boarding school for the blind, Gohar excelled to such a degree that she became the first blind student to be accepted at the University of Tehran. She graduated in 1970, with a BA in psychology. As much a moving account of a heroic personal struggle as a telling indictment of a society in which being female was almost as disabling as being blind. Stirring reading.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993

ISBN: 1-85242-213-0

Page Count: 141

Publisher: Serpent’s Tail

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)