Of interest to students of the Iranian system as well as free-press advocates.
Washington Post opinion writer and CNN contributor Rezaian recounts his 544 days of imprisonment at the hands of the Iranian regime.
A native of Iran whose family had immigrated to the United States decades earlier, the author moved to Tehran to head the Washington Post bureau there. It was a good gig, well paid in dollars, while, because his wife was an Iranian citizen, they were allowed to pay in local currency. “Life was good,” he writes. Although he favored local-color stories, often about food, and guided Anthony Bourdain through the city for an episode of Parts Unknown (this book is published under Bourdain’s imprint), he still managed to fall afoul of the secret police. The charge eventually cooked up for him was definitively Orwellian: “As a member of the American press writing what could only be perceived as neutral stories about Iran, I was attempting to soften American public opinion toward the Islamic Republic”—a softening that would allow American values to circulate within the country. After developing strategies to avoid despair while in solitary confinement (“if you’re lucky you learn to quiet your mind, just a little, and live softly”), Rezaian could do little more than wait it out even as Iranian agents threatened to add time to his sentence because his mother was publicly protesting his imprisonment. “Why is your mother coordinating with the BBC to ruin your life?” asked one. The author credits a concerted campaign on the part of Post editor Martin Baron, his brother, and other intermediaries for his release after having been “the plaything of some of the nastiest authoritarian ideologues to roam the earth in many decades.” Rezaian also allows that one of his captors got at least one thing right: He correctly predicted the outcome of the 2016 election in the U.S., saying, “Trump is the candidate that hates Muslims most."
Of interest to students of the Iranian system as well as free-press advocates.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-269157-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Anthony Bourdain/Ecco
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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