Useful survey of the roiling state of recent Iranian affairs.
Iranian-born journalist Majd (The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran, 2008) offers a nimble take on Iran’s fraught political landscape.
“Massive fraud,” writes the author, accompanied the official announcement of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “landslide re-election” against rival Mir Hossein Mousavi in June 2009, giving the lie to the so-called Green Movement of reform. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, validated the results shortly thereafter by declaring a triumph of “religious democracy on display for the whole world to witness.” People were stunned, yet the Islamic Republic has survived for 30 years and is “not a form of government to write off just yet.” How to account for its resiliency and even public support? Majd, an Iranian diplomat’s son who was largely educated in America, has impeccable connections and is able to infiltrate the official and nonofficial camps fluidly. In somewhat erratically organized but readable essays, he is determined to get at the oghdeh, or complexes, that underscore the Iranian psyche. When angry Iranians took to the street to protest the election results, the delighted Western media proclaimed the uprising “a rejection of the Islamic regime altogether,” thus playing into the hands of Ahmadinejad’s supporters, who depicted the movement as a foreign-inspired plot to overthrow the government. First and foremost, the Iranians reject foreign influence and deeply revere democratic ideals. Abrasive and irreverent, with humble provincial roots as the son of a blacksmith, Ahmadinejad has endeared himself to the masses by his muscling of the elite. Majd looks at Iran’s grandiose aspirations abroad, as well its as pernicious support of Hezbollah; the evolving relationship with President Obama; the tenacity of Iranian Jews who insist on staying despite Ahmadinejad’s poisonous anti-Semitic statements; and the power of the mullahs.
Useful survey of the roiling state of recent Iranian affairs.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-07259-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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
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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