Too devoted to the conventions of travelogues past, but offers an unexpectedly enlightening introduction to an unfairly...
After quitting his job, open-minded author Maslin loaded a backpack and hitched to Iran, where he spent nine weeks debunking Western misconceptions.
Travel narratives often conclude that preconceived notions about exotic lands are often absurdly erroneous, a grand tradition that Maslin’s debut enthusiastically perpetuates. Unsatisfied with life in a cubicle, the author decided to take a sojourn to Iran, despite warnings and admonitions from friends who, under the influence of Western media, denigrate the country as little more than a safe haven for terrorists. Casting aside those prejudices upon entering the country, he quickly discovered that, rather than being hated, he received the royal treatment from nearly everyone he met. So enthusiastically welcoming were the residents, in fact, that they generously purchased food and drinks, offered their beds and provided recommendations for and transportation to places of historical interest. The unexpectedly universal hospitality was accompanied by widespread disdain among the people for politicians ranging from the former ruling Shah and current President Ahmadinejad to George Bush and Tony Blair. Conversely, Irish pop singer Chris de Burgh, one of the only non-Iranian artists sanctioned by the government, is revered. Maslin provides a balanced blend of social commentary—including discussions of the role the United States and Britain played in manipulating the Iranian government, and younger Iranians’ fascination with Western culture, including rap music and pornography—and travel guidance, including notes on various bazaars, historical sights and churches). Occasionally the author’s good-natured attempts at humor veer off track and transform his well-meaning hosts into stereotypically crazy foreign caricatures worthy of Sacha Baron Cohen.
Too devoted to the conventions of travelogues past, but offers an unexpectedly enlightening introduction to an unfairly misunderstood country and culture.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60239-791-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An invigoratingly candid memoir from a giant of women’s rights.
A respected feminist activist’s memoir about the life lessons she learned as a peripatetic political organizer.
Until she was 10 years old, Steinem (Moving Beyond Words, 1993, etc.) grew up following two parents who could never seem to put down roots. Only after her stability-craving mother separated from her restlessly migratory father did she settle—for a brief time until college—into “the most conventional life” she would ever lead. After that, she began travels that would first take her to Europe and then later to India, where she began to awaken to the possibility that her father’s lonely way of traveling “wasn’t the only one.” Journeying could be a shared experience that could lead to breakthroughs in consciousness of the kind Steinem underwent after observing Indian villagers coming together in “talking circles” to discuss community issues. Once she returned to the United States, she went to New York City, where she became an itinerant freelance journalist. After observing the absence of female voices at the 1963 March on Washington, Steinem began gathering together black and white women to begin the conversation that would soon become a larger national fight for women’s rights. In the 1970s and beyond, Steinem went on the road to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and for female political candidates like 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. Along the way, Steinem began work with Native American women activists who taught her about the interconnectedness of all living things and the importance of balance. From this, she learned to walk the middle path between a life on the road and one at home: for in the end, she writes, "[c]aring for a home is caring for one's self.” Illuminating and inspiring, this book presents a distinguished woman's exhilarating vision of what it means to live with openness, honesty, and a willingness to grow beyond the apparent confinement of seemingly irreconcilable polarities.
An invigoratingly candid memoir from a giant of women’s rights.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-679-45620-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
A memoir of sorts that blurs the boundary between the personal and the universal.
An American poet of Japanese descent illuminates the tensions that exploded with World War II and the aftershocks within his family.
By the time Shimoda (The Desert, 2018, etc.) came to know his grandfather, the latter was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and thus it was only after his death that the author began to untangle the narrative of his life as a citizen of one country living in another. The resonance of the story that he pieces together, through pilgrimages back to Japan and across the United States, extends well beyond a single family or ethnicity to the soul of his own native country, where “white settlers were the original aliens. They sought to diffuse their alienation, by claiming the land and controlling the movement and rights of the people for whom the land was not alien, but ancestral.” Shimoda’s grandfather was conceived in Honolulu and born in Japan, and he crossed the ocean to Seattle as a 9-year-old boy, without the rest of his family. World War II turned him into an “enemy alien,” though, as the author writes, “he was not born an enemy alien. He was made into an enemy alien. The first (alien) phase was immigration. The third (enemy) phase was the attack on Pearl Harbor. The second phase was the transition. Which was, for a Japanese man, ineligible for citizenship, compulsory.” He was a trained photographer, and by all evidence, a very good and sensitive one, but the main offense on which he was initially incarcerated was possessing a camera. Shimoda wades through memories and dreams; lives and graves that have no names documented; unspeakable horrors committed by the country where his grandfather lived on the people of his native country; and the attempts to memorialize what is too graphically terrible to remember. By the end, writes the author, “I was just learning how to see.”
A memoir of sorts that blurs the boundary between the personal and the universal.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-87286-790-1
Page Count: 186
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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