A valiant attempt at emotional connection with the lost motherland.
The Iranian-American author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (2008) finds “home” in Iran with his American wife and baby a complicated, incongruous place.
Having helped define the Iranian prickliness for American readers in his previous works, Majd, born to Iranian diplomats who left the country when he was young, resolved to take his blonde American wife and small child to live in Iran for a year. Why subject himself to the scrutiny of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and his wife to censorious roving patrols ticketing women for not “covering” themselves properly? Why endure the stultifying mix of the country’s authoritarianism, religiosity and top-heavy cosmopolitanism? Majd, whose grandfather was an ayatollah, is a veteran journalist, keen to experience the Iranian revolution from the inside and familiarize himself with the supremely proud, nationalistic spirit of his native people. At the time of their yearlong visit, in 2011, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was still very much in power, the Green Movement was definitively quelled, and sanctions by the international community tightened to make inflation a living hell for most Iranians, with the sense of government tentacles felt everywhere. Yet the author speaks Farsi and has numerous family in the country, the monotony of life—a kind of endless 30-plus-year waiting game for things to be normalized, during which the Iranians regularly indulge in what Majd calls “the big sulk”—was dissipated by invitations to parties and elaborate social occasions within the international community. The author offers useful suggestions on finding an apartment, navigating the reconfigured currency, setting up Internet and TV connections, securing a steady liquor supply and finding his wife’s organic baby goods, among other essentials. Majd used his year to relish the irrepressible quirks of the Persian character.
A valiant attempt at emotional connection with the lost motherland.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-53532-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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