In an autobiography coauthored by his daughter, Farmanfarmaian provides intriguing glimpses of upper-class Persian society that more than make up for the occasional ego-stroking. This man has led an interesting life. Born in a harem in 1917, he studied petroleum engineering in England, held ministerial-level posts overseeing production of oil in Iran from the late 1940s to the early '70s, served as ambassador to Venezuela, escaped form Khomeini's Islamic Republic after the revolution, and currently manages a potato chip factory. He brings technical knowledge of the oil business and familiarity with Western culture to his account of critical events, including the creation of OPEC, but does not place Western interests and values above those of his native country. From his perspective it was the prejudice and stupidity of colonialism that led to the nationalization of the British corporation that monopolized Iranian oil production. Similarly, it was the hypocrisy of American support of the shah without regard to his repressive domestic policies that undermined the popularity of the US in Iran and helped create the conditions for revolution. Blood precedes oil in the title of this book, however, and family is the centerpiece of this story and this society. The pervasive significance of family connections, extended by the practice of polygamy, is evident throughout this book and makes American efforts at networking seem paltry in comparison. Farmanfarmaian accepts this social milieu as a matter of course, but his description of a society in which families are really important and a family's reputation shapes individual opportunities should give American promoters of the family something to think about. While Farmanfarmaian's apparently lifelong ability to perceive events more clearly than others sometimes strains the reader's credulity, this is nevertheless a fascinating look inside a world not well known or understood by Americans. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-44055-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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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